Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism

The work was completed during the night of 17 November, since word had come the previous day that the imperial train was scheduled to pass Alexandrovsk on the 18th. That morning the three conspirators drove out to the spot on the road opposite the mines, taking with them an electric battery and an induction coil. The ends of the wires that led to the mines were connected with the apparatus, and then the men waited. When the train reached the spot over the mines Okladsky shouted: 'Go to it!' and Zhelyabov closed the circuit. There was no explosion as the cars thundered on.

Zhelyabov was sick with disappointment. The cause of the failure has remained a mystery. Immediately after the train had passed, the men examined the apparatus and the wiring and were unable to detect anything wrong. Okladsky eventually turned informer, entering the service of the police, and lived long enough to be tried by a Soviet court as a former secret service agent. The prosecutor suggested that the man had intentionally sabotaged the enterprise by cutting the wire, but no evidence has come forth to substantiate this theory.

It proved impossible to salvage the mines, and they were left undisturbed. Perhaps the Committee entertained the idea of using them a second time if the Czar passed that way the following year.

II

The conspirators did not rely on the Alexandrovsk mines alone. Farther along the Emperor's route another charge was to be fired under his train. Should the one fail, the other might succeed.

The locality was chosen by Alexander Mikhailov, who headed the enterprise. It was a Moscow suburb -- a place of scattered cottages and wide, unpaved, grassy streets -- of which the police took small notice. A two-storey house situated near the railway track some two miles south of the Moscow station was purchased in the name of one Sukhorukov, merchant. This was Lev Hartmarm, the son of a German immigrant. Hartmann was an activist, of scanty schooling and mature years, who had recently been admitted to the Executive Committee. On 22 September the merchant and his 'wife,' who was none other than Sofya Perovskaya, took possession. The two of them were to be assisted by half a dozen other comrades beside Mikhailov, all of them quartered in the city. The dynamite had been manufactured and brought to Moscow by Stegan Shiryayev, who was in charge of preparing, laying, and wiring the mine.

Explaining to the neighbours that they wanted to build an ice-cellar, the new owners had two hired labourers dig a deep pit in the kitchen. Then came the real work: the excavation of a tunnel to the railway embankment, a distance of some one hundred and fifty feet. It was decided to give it a triangular shape, shoring the sides with boards and leaving the floor bare. None of the conspirators had any experience in mining, and they had only the simplest tools: a large shovel, an 'English spade,' a trowel. There was room in the tunnel for just one person at a time. He could move in it only by crawling and had to work in a crouching position. As the gallery lengthened, it became necessary to instal a primitive ventilator, but the cold, damp air was still so close that the men could stay at work for a short time only. At first, the earth was shovelled out, later it was hauled out with the aid of a windlass and scattered in the yard at night, in the hope that by morning it would either be partly washed away or snowed under.

A difficult problem was presented by the neighbours, who had the inquisitiveness of small-town folk. But the master of the house acted his part well, and the mistress was even cleverer in keeping suspicion at bay. The couple dressed, gestured, spoke in their assumed character of tradespeople, and the rooms were appropriately provided with icons and portraits of czars and metropolitans. The conspirators who were staying in the city would arrive early in the morning and leave late at night as inconspicuously as possible. A quantity of nitr-glycerine sufficient to blow up the cottage was kept in two bottles under a bed. Perovskaya was to explode it with a shot at the appearance of police. The group had vowed not to be taken alive.

Progress was slow. There were unforeseen delays. Early in November came a heavy snowfall, followed by a thaw, and the pit in front of the gallery was turned into a puddle, while the gallery itself was flooded. Some of the water was baled out, and thereafter the men worked sitting in thin, icy mud. Then one morning the company made an appalling discovery. The tunnel crossed a rough dirt road that ran parallel to the railway track. Because of heavy autumn rains a washout had formed on the road, and through the hole the roof of the gallery was in plain sight. However, the water wagon that usually passed that way failed to appear, and the men were able to fill the hole without arousing any suspicion. Luck was with them again when a conflagration broke out in a neighbouring house: the fire was put out before it could endanger the Sukhorukov cottage.

Meanwhile it was getting more and more difficult to remove the earth, and the air in the shaft was so bad that sometimes the digger's lantern went out and he himself fainted as he crouched in the ooze. The situation became even more trying as the tunnel got closer to the railway embankment. Because of faulty construction, the mouth of the gallery was somewhat higher than its rear, and there the water tended to accumulate. To get rid of it, a low dam was made and the water baled over it. The dam turned the rear of the gallery into the semblance of a tomb. The worker was in constant danger of being buried alive, for the earth there was crumbly, and when a train passed overhead a cave-in was a definite possibility, all the more so since that part of the tunnel was not shored up. In fact, Hart-mann is said to have carried poison with him to put an end to his sufferings in case of a catastrophe. But the physical wretchedness and the anxiety were matched by a rare exaltation. Mikhailov said that as he sat in the mud digging away, his back against the dam, for the first time in his life looking into the cold eyes of death, he remained calm. Indeed, he was rather thrilled by the weight and might of the train as it thundered overhead, shaking up everything like an earthquake. The company did not lose the ability to laugh and crack jokes at their mishaps. Jollity reigned at the dinner table around which all would gather at two o'clock.

They had hoped to reach the tunnel by the beginning of November, but when November came there was still much digging to be done. Time was getting short. It was decided to get a steel drill to reach the tracks. Probably in order to buy it, they mortgaged the house -- a risky step, since it involved a preliminary inspection of the premises in the presence of a police officer. But the transaction was carried out without a hitch.

They worked feverishly now, fighting exhaustion and sickness. Sofya Perovskaya's endurance was amazing. All were buoyed up by a passion that defied physical obstacles. 'The conflict here was not between man and man,' Mikhailov testified, 'not between the weak and the strong, but between embodied idea and material force.'

Finally, with infinite pains, the brass cylinders containing some eighty pounds of dynamite were set In place and wired. Tne experts feared" that the cfiarge was not sufficiently powerful and that the mines had not been pushed far enough under the track, but that could not be helped.

Word came that the imperial train was due to reach Moscow at about tenb p.m. on 19 November. The six regular members of the group and two visittors held a celebration on the eve of the fateful day. Their emaciated faces lit by the ghastly flame of burning alcohol, they drank to the success of the enterprise and sang revolutionary songs around a table in which eight daggers 'were stuck cross-wise' above eight revolvers. Thus runs an account of the evening that Hartmann wrote for the New York Herald some two yearsjater. It may be presumed that some of these lurid details, meant to impress a gullible foreign public, were the product of his imagination.

In the morning all except Shiryayev and Perovskaya left the cottage. He was to close the circuit; she was to watch the track through a slit in the wall of a shed and give the signal at the approach of the Czar's train. She was proud and happy to be thus honored.

Extraordinary precautions were taken to protect the Emperor while he was travelling. He was on board one train, while another carried his retinue, servants and baggage, and he would change trains secretly at stations. The story goes that the conspirators received a telegram in code to the effect that the Czar occupied the fourth car in the .second train. A little after nine p.m. a train flashed by. Perovskaya decided that it was the imperial retinue train, which was usually sent ahead to test the safety of the way. At ten twenty-five the lights of another locomotive peered out of the darkness. Perovskaya gave the signal, and Shiryayev pressed the lever. There was a deafening report. The two locomotives and the first car broke away, a freight car loaded with Crimean fruit was overturned and smashed, many cars were derailed. No one on board the train was hurt. The Czar was not among the passengers. At the last moment the imperial train had been sent ahead of the one that carried the Czar's retinue.

Shortly after the explosion the police entered the Sukhorukov cottage. There was a fire in the stove, a candle was burning on the table, which was set for two, but there was no trace of the occupants.

A plan to mine one more spot on the road connecting the Crimea with the capital had been under consideration, but it had not been carried out.

On 22 November the People's Will issued a proclamation about the attempt on the Czar's life. It was the first such pronouncement of the Executive Committee which had become the nucleus of the newly formed secret society. Herein Alexander II is described as 'the embodiment of despotism, hypocritical, cowardly, bloodthirsty and all-corrupting . . . the main usurper of the people's sovereignty, the middle pillar of reaction, the chief perpetrator of judicial murders,' with fourteen executions on his conscience. 'He deserves the death penalty for all the blood he has shed, for all the pain he has caused. ... Only if he were to renounce his power and hand it over to a freely elected Constituent Assembly . . . would we leave him in peace and forgive his crimes. Until that time -- war, implacable war, to the last drop of our blood!'

The article on the attempt in the issue of Narodnaya volya dated 1 January, 1880, had as its epigraph the words of Edouard Vaillant, member of the Paris Commune: 'Society! has only one obligation toward monarchs: to put them to \ death.' -J

III

The attempts to wreck the Czar's train had failed. The conspirators could take heart from the fact that despite these efforts the Executive Committee was intact. The end must be reached by other means.

One of the two men who had headed the Northern Union of Russian Workers, mentioned earlier, was Stepan Khalturin, a cabinetmaker of peasant stock. In his teens he had belonged to a group of boys in his native Vyatka who were planning to emigrate to America. He reached Petersburg too late to embark from there with the others, fell in with the Chaikovsky Circle and became a propagandist among fellow workmen. When the Northern Union was smashed in 1879, he escaped the police net. By that time he had become a confirmed partisan of terrorism. The idea that the Czar should perish at the hand of a man of the people became an obsession with him.

250 / Road to Revolution

He decided to gain entrance to the Emperor's entourage in the capacity of a mechanic and kill him at the first opportunity. This plan he abandoned in favour of another, as daring as it was inept: blowing up the Winter Palace. He undertook to do this single-handed. All he asked of the Committee was a supply of dynamite.

He had at one time worked on the Czar's private yacht, and being a skilful craftsman -- he could give a surface so high a polish that 'a flea could not take a jump on it,' as the Russian saying goes -- he found employment on the maintenance force of the Winter Palace. This was late in September, 1879. Together with three carpenters he lodged in the basement of the building. Directly overhead were the guards' quarters and above them the so-called Yellow Hall, where the Emperor usually dined en famille. The plan was to explode a charge of dynamite in the basement when the Czar was in the dining-room, in the hope of wrecking it and killing its occupants.

While the Emperor was in the Crimea, Khalturin's position was easy. Everyone liked the handsome, tall, thin youth -- he was a consumptive -- who acted the part of a yokel. There was little supervision of the staff. While the front entrances were strictly guarded, the back doors were open day and night to the servants and any stray companions they might choose to entertain in their quarters. Under these circumstances it was not difficult for Khalturin to smuggle in small quantities of the explosive in the guise of sugar.

The situation changed after the Czar's return from the south and particularly after the arrest, late in November, of Kvyatkovsky, the member of the Executive Committee who maintained contact with Khalturin. In addition to a quantity of dynamite and apparatus for the preparation of a mine, the police found among Kvyatkovsky's papers two plans of the Winter Palace with the dining-room marked by a red cross. The building was searched and, although nothing suspicious was found, extraordinary security measures were inaugurated. The entrances to the palace were closely guarded, the maintenance force was carefully screened, a gendarme moved into the carpenters' quarters which were subjected to sudden raids.

Khalturin continued to be held above suspicion. In fact, the aged gendarme took a special liking to him and even planned a match between the young man and his own marriageable daughter. Khalturin moved freely about the palace. On one occasion he found himself alone with the Czar in his study, where some repair work had to be done. He had a hammer in his hand and could easily have killed the monarch from behind. He could not bring himself to do it. On another occasion this man who plotted the Czar's death and firmly believed him to be the people's worst enemy, took a trifling object from his desk and treasured it as a souvenir.

In spite of the increased risk, Khalturin went on adding to his stock of dynamite. At first he had placed it under his pillow, although this gave him severe headaches. Later he transferred it to a chest where he kept his linen and clothes. Excavating, and laying a mine in the basement, or in any way directing the force of the explosion, was out of the question. The chest placed in a corner was to act as a mine. The chances of success were so slight that the enterprise verged on the fantastic. The Executive Committee may have realized this, but snatched at desperate measures.

By the beginning of February Khalturin had stored in his chest about a hundred pounds of explosive. He kept asking for more. Zhelyabov, who had replaced Kvyatkovsky after the lat-ter's arrest, admired the man's pluck, but quoted the experts' opinion that the amount was sufficient to demolish the Czar's dining-room. He was thinking of the risk of detection that further delay would involve, and perhaps also of the innocent people who were bound to be injured by a bigger explosion. Finally the rumour spread that the carpenters were to be moved out of the palace, and it was decided to act.

Khalturin was to take advantage of the earliest moment that the carpenters would be out of the basement and the Czar in the Yellow Hall. Such an opportunity presented itself on 5 February, 1880. He knew that the imperial family dined about six-thirty. Finding himself alone in his quarters that evening, he fired a fuse connected with a detonator of fulminate of mercury placed in the chest and left the building.

At six-twenty he met Zhelyabov a short distance from the palace, and just as he greeted him there was an explosion. It shook the immense edifice, smashing over a thousand window panes and putting out all the lights. The guardroom above the basement was demolished, but the dining hall directly overhead was_only slightly damaged: the~Hobr sagged" and one wall sprang a crack. TheTofal number of casualties was ijleven killed and fifty-six wounded, many of them soldiers on guard duty". The injured merTrefused to leave their posts until properly relieved. The Czar was not among the victims. At the moment of the explosion he was on his way to the Lesser Hall of Marshals to meet the Grand Duke of Hesse and the latter's son Alexander, Prince of Bulgaria, who had come to dine with the imperial family. Even had the Czar been in the dining-room, he would not have been harmed.

Khalturin managed to make his way quietly out of the capital. He was profoundly disheartened, and many months passed before he resumed an active role in the People's Will.

In its proclamation issued hot upon the event, the Executive Committee, trying to save its face, stated that the dynamite charge had been calculated correctly, but that the Czar was half an hour late for dinner and thus escaped alive, 'to the misfortune of our country.' It expressed deep regret over the death of the soldiers of the guard and concluded by declaring that the fight would go on until Alexander II abdicated in favour of the people and placed social reconstruction in the hands of a freely elected Constituent Assembly.

The explosion at the palace greatly added to the prestige of the Executive Committee. The public could not help being awed by this mysterious, redoubtable body that had dared to pit itself against all the resources of a mighty Empire.

IV

The acts of terror were beginning to give the Government a case of nerves. On 26 May, 1879, Count Valuyev, one of the most influential and less benighted members of the ruling hierarchy, made this entry in his private diary: 'It seems to me that everything is crumbling and collapsing piecemeal -- and that I am powerless to arrest this process.' And a few days later: 'I feel that the ground is shaking, the house threatens to crash down, but the tenants don't seem to notice it.' A year passed, and he was writing: 'Alone a supernatural power can stop the landslide. The Government is besieged, but imagines itself the besieger.'

On the day after the train had been blown up near Moscow the Czar received representatives of the various estates in the Kremlin. He promised the nobles to take energetic measures against subversion and wordless, with tears in his eyes, he passed through the halls where the members of the other estates were gathered. The organ of the People's Will noted the absence of patriotic demonstrations in the city. In the evening Alexander attended a rout given by the Governor-General. He looked old, his eyes were lustreless, his breathing laboured. 'In the hands of this flabby, cowardly, pleasure-loving, dissolute man is the fate of a nation of a hundred million,' ran an account by an eye-witness printed in Narodnaya volya. The next day he took part in the traditional procession from the Uspensky Cathedral to the Chudov Monastery in the Kremlin. The two buildings are separated by a few dozen yards. In former years the Czar had walked this distance in plain view of the populace. This time he proceeded in a carriage surrounded by an armed escort. It was whispered in the crowd of onlookers that he had been led out of the cathedral under guard, like a prisoner.

The Winter Palace explosion threw the capital into a turmoil. People began to leave the city in panic. It was expected that grave disturbances would occur on 19 February, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alexander's reign. The London Times reported the rumour that on that day the three principal avenues would be blown up. Nothing untoward happened, and the city soon quieted down. To mark the anniversary a reception was held at the palace. The Czar looked like a 'ghost,' Viscount Vogue thought. 'Never,' wrote the French diplomat in his diary, 'have I seen him so pitiful, aged, played out, choked by a fit of asthmatic coughing at every word. . . . Behind him another ruin, the old Chancellor [Gorchakov], who has been trotted out for this supreme occasion, like a mummy taken out for an airing. He leans against one of the columns of the Hall of Peter the Great so as not to fall, like the Empire that he directs; he understands nothing, recognizes no one, and keeps repeating: "I'm done for. I'm done for." It looks as if he would have to be carried out by the spoonful. We are disturbed by the spectacle of these human ruins ... in this palace that trembles.' In the evening there was a gala performance of Glinka's A Life for the Czar, and the diarist noted the empty boxes, from which 'no doubt fear had chased the tenants.'

A few days after the explosion the Emperor appointed a Supreme Commission for the Maintenance of State Order and Public Peace. At the head of this body, which was vested with practically unlimited authority, he placed Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, a hero of the Turkish war and a brilliant administrator who, in spite of his lowly origin -- he was the son of an Armenian merchant -- was rapidly making his way to the top of the bureaucratic ladder.

Almost at once the Government had an opportunity to demonstrate its decision to deal ruthlessly with terrorists. Loris-Melikov had been in office hardly more than a week when there was an attempt on his life, which, however, left him without a scratch. His assailant was a former Yeshiva student by the name of Mlodecki who had embraced Christianity to make it easier foFTum to carry the message of revolution to the peasantry. In firing at the Count he had acted without the help and indeed the knowledge of the Executive Committee. The young man was seized in flagrante delicto, court-martialled and hanged two days later (22 February, 1880). Years afterwards Loris-Melikov asserted that the execution had been carried out against his will, at the Czar's instance. In March, two men were sent_to_the_gallows in Kiev for distributing underground leaflets. Their execution figures in the uncensored text of Tolstoy's novel, Resurrection, as the shattering experience transforming an unpolitical, scholarly youth into a revolutionary.

Loris-Melikov's programme of combating sedition was not, however, confined to punitive measures and to increasing the efficiency of the police. He decided that to cut the ground from under the revolutionaries' feet it was necessary for the monarch to complete the reforms that had marked the beginning of his reign. The younger generation, he argued, should be treated with leniency, in the hope that it would make its peace with the State and with society, Above all, the population should be given a chance to participate, through representatives, in legislative work having to do with local matters. The bureaucracy was becoming aware of the danger of functioning in complete isolation from the people.

One of the first acts of the head of the Supreme Commission was to issue an appeal to the public, stating that he relied chiefly on its support in restoring law and order. Two years earlier, after the assassination of Mezentzev, a similar appeal had been made, but while that had remained an empty gesture, Loris-Melikov struck the keynote of a brief era of official liberalism which at the time was dubbed 'the dictatorship of the heart.' Certain security measures that inconvenienced the population without hampering the revolutionaries were repealed; some political deportees were set free; the censor's hand was stayed; Count Tolstoy, the reactionary Minister of Education, whom the GeneraTheld chiefly responsible for the spread of radicalism, was dismissed.

At this time the Executive Committee hatched two more plots against the Czar's life, of which later. They miscarried, and the police remained unaware of them. The policy of toughness with revolutionaries and concessions to loyal subjects seemed to work: acts of terrorism appeared to have ceased. By the end of the summer the authorities were sufficiently reassured to do away with the Supreme Commission. In reporting this measure, the correspondent of the London Times wrote that Loris-Melikov 'had broken the spirit, if not the backbone, of the revolutionary monster.'

The Count remained at the helm as Minister of the Interior. Without delay he obtained the abolition of the dreaded Third Division which, as he said in a private communication, 'for over half a century had stood outside and above the law.' This amounted to little more than a change of name, however, for the political police was not abolished. Its functions were merely turned over to a department of the Ministry of the Interior. This pattern was to be followed in a later generation, when the Cheka. a descendant of the Third Division, would be abolished, only to reappear under a succession of names.

The new Minister was largely responsible for another measure: teams of senators were dispatched to certain provinces to gather information about the needs of the population. The data were to be used in formulating reforms. He then suggested a further step, which he believed to be the most effective way to fight sedition. He proposed that a General Commission should participate in the legislative work entailed by the prospective reforms. In addition to civil servants and specially appointed experts, the Commission was to include -- and this was a great innovation -- delegates elected by the zemstvo boards and municipal councils of the larger cities. It was to function in a strictly consultative capacity. Nothing was further from the Minister's mind than the intention to set up an agency that would encroach on the monarch's absolute authority. Nevertheless, the plan was held to be a timid step toward a parliamentary regime. Alexander himself is variously reported to have likened the Commission to the Etats Generaux or the Assemblee des Notables convoked by Louis XVI, and to have added: 'We must not forget what followed.'

In previous years similar and even bolder proposals had been made by several statesmen, including the Czar's brother, Constantine, but they were all stillborn. The 'Loris-Melikov constitution,' as the project of the Commission came to be called, was favourably reported on by a special committee of high dignitaries including the Heir Apparent and, on 17 February, 1881, it received the seal of approval from the Emperor.

V

Aside from the cessation of acts of violence, the authorities had yet another reason to feel reassured: by the spring of 1880 the cloak of mystery had fallen from the terrorist group. On 14 November, 1879, a young man was arrested at the Yelizavetgrad (now Kirovo) railway station, and his suitcase proved to contain a quantity of dynamite. This was Grigory Goldenberg, known to his comrades as 'Beaconsfield,' apparently in allusion to his Jewish origin, the only trait he shared with Dizzy. His experiences resembled those of most of the men who joined the small band of terrorists that was to be the core of the People's Will. In his early twenties, already an illegal with prison and exile in his past, he read in an underground pamphlet entitled Burned Alive about the treatment of politicals in the Kharkov prisons, and he decided to kill Prince Kropotkin, Governor-General of Kharkov. When, after shadowing his man for days, he fired the fatal shots (on 9 March ,1879), he was in a state of intolerable tension. In fact, he had made up his mind to take his own life if there were further delay. He had intended to give himself up on the spot, so as to enhance the effect of the prince's death with that of his own. But the Executive Committee succeeded in making him abandon his idea, and he managed to evade arrest. Shortly thereafter he volunteered to assassinate the Czar, but his offer was rejected, and the attempt was carried out by Solovyov. He had knowledge of the Alexandrovsk enterprise and he participated in the mining of the track near Moscow. To that end he undertook to bring home dynamite from Odessa. It was this trip that landed him in jail.

Goldenberg was not unintelligent, but he was inordinately gullible and given to day-dreaming, in which self-exaltation played a large part. Furthermore, he alternated between spurts of rapturous elation and periods of abysmal depression. Just before he died he recognized that he had been 'mentally ill,' a fact apparently not realized by the rest of the inner circle of conspirators.

At first, in spite of threats, the prisoner refused to make a deposition. He did, however, talk -- and at great length -- to a fellow political with whom he shared a cell. He did not suspect that his comrade was an informer planted by the police. In this way the authorities learned that the man they were holding was Prince Kropotkin's assassin. He admitted nothing. It was only in February (1880) that he prepared a statement, in which he confessed his crime. His main purpose in committing it, he wrote, was to lay bare in court Kropotkin's brutality. He did not regret his act: 'Let my blood, too, be the seed of Socialism, just as the blood of the early martyrs was the seed of the Christian Church.' He blamed the Government's white terror for the red terror. And he ended with an impassioned appeal to the Czar to stop 'the fratricidal war,' warning him that blood would continue to be shed until the country had a regime guaranteeing the people freedom under law.

Yet when he was making this deposition, he was no longer sure that he and his comrades were on the right road. Now kept in solitary confinement, he had ample opportunity to subject his beliefs to a thorough scrutiny. Presently his uncertainty crystallized into the conviction that political terror was a tragic failure. It interfered with the work of enlightenment and organization, and if it demanded heroism, it also sowed the seeds of treason. Besides, the revolutionaries did not have the shadow of a chance to come out on top in the unequal struggle against the Government. They must lay down their arms, and before long the Czar would be sure to grant the country a democratic regime, and under the sun of freedom the way would be speedily prepared for the advent of Socialism.

Goldenberg did not reach this delightful conclusion unaided. The prompting of his questioners helped him to it. The secret service men were beginning to use rather sophisticated methods of handling prisoners. They played on the young man's credulity, flightiness, and self-regard. They succeeded in convincing him that they, too, had the interests of the people at heart. A reconciliation between the two warring camps was possible, they suggested, and he, Goldenberg, might personally bring it about. One officer hinted that a constitution was to be promulgated that very year. What gave a semblance of reality to the hint was that rumours of the great reforms associated with Loris-Melikov's name penetrated even the prison walls. The Count himself twice visited the prisoner in his cell and made a favourable impression. The repentant terrorist decided that Loris-Melikov was to be the saviour of Russia.

He was now possessed by one idea: it was his duty to stop the futile murders and the hangings that followed them. But how? Finally, he hit upon what seemed to him a stroke of genius -- again not without the prompting of his astute examiners. He would tell the authorities all about his own revolutionary activities and all he knew about the activities of his fellow conspirators. This would disarm the Government, it would have no excuse for going on with the policy of repression, the hopeless fight would cease, and many precious young lives would be saved. True, his revelations would lead to a number of arrests, but at worst they would result in sentences of hard labour. Then a year or two later there would be a general amnesty, and the prisons would disgorge their inmates; before long, Russia would have a constitutional regime and a glorious era of freedom would commence. And he, Goldenberg, would have played no small part in bringing all this about.

In March he signed a formal confession. He spared neither himself nor his comrades. He gave names, real and assumed, addresses, identifying marks; he outlined the history of the People's Will as well as its organization and methods of propaganda; he told all he knew of the various attempts on the Czar's life. In April he was transferred from the Odessa prison to the Fortress of Peter and Paul. While he travelled north, he was put in irons. When he reached his destination, they were removed, much to his regret. 'In irons,' he wrote to his sister, 'it is somehow pleasanter, better, morally more satisfying.' Alone the fear of being declared insane prevented him from asking to keep his fetters. In his new prison he continued his revelations.

When he first resolved to turn informer, he had been ecstatically happy. He had given ample proof that he was ready to lay down his life for the cause. Now he was going to stake his honour, risk the reputation of a Judas. But events would vindicate him, and in good time it would be recognized that he had been prompted by the highest motives. He told his mother on one of her visits to him that she would have reason to be proud of her son. When in May two death sentences meted out to political offenders were commuted to hard labour, he attributed this to his disclosures. So firm was his conviction of having done the right thing that he believed that he might win over some of his comrades. He was permitted to talk without witnesses to Zundelevich, who was now a fellow prisoner. But far from being converted, Zundelevich apparently succeeded in raising terrible doubts in Goldenberg's mind.

The time of his trial drew near. He wrote to Loris-Melikov requesting that he be shown no clemency. The thought of being rewarded for his services to the authorities was intolerable to him. He also penned a lengthy confession addressed to 'Friends, comrades, honest people of the whole world, known and unknown to me,' a confused and anguished apologia. Then, too, he wrote frantic little notes assuring his comrades that he had sought their happiness, not their ruin, and that he continued to be faithful to the cause.

He was already half aware that he had been tricked by the cunning of his examiners and his own naivete and folly into becoming an ordinary informer. Perhaps a conversation he was permitted to have with Zundelevich on 10 July finally opened his eyes to the dreadful reality. On one occasion he had hinted to his questioners that if he ever came to repent his frankness even for a moment, he would commit suicide. On 15 July he managed to strangle himself with a towel attached to the faucet of his washstand.

Kletochnikov, the Party's counter-spy, was able to keep the Executive Committee informed about Goldenberg's disclosures and thus somewhat neutralize them. Nevertheless they had a disastrous effect on the fortunes of the People's Will.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar13.html

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Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 14

Sic Semper Tyrannis

As has been stated, during the first months of Loris-Melikov's ascendancy there were two additional equally abortive attempts on the life of Alexander II. One occurred in Odessa. Rumour had it that he would pass through the city in the spring on his way to Livadia. Accordingly a couple, consisting of Sofya Perovskaya and a nominal husband of hers, opened a grocery on the street along which the Czar was bound to be driven on his way from the railway station to the harbour. The plan was to dig a tunnel from the store and lay a mine under the roadway. The work was actually begun, with the help of half a dozen men and women, including Vera Figner. In the latter part of May, however, it became known that the Emperor was not likely to go south just then, since the empress lay on her deathbed (she died on 22 May). As a result, the operations were discontinued.

The conspirators then proposed that the work be completed to the end of doing away with Todleben, Governor General of the Odessa region. He had earned the hatred of the revolutionaries by his ruthlessness, and in any case there was a plan afoot to force the authorities to abolish the office of Governor General by systematically obliterating its incumbents. The Executive Committee decided, however, that the mine, as a method of assassination, should be reserved for the Czar. And so, traces of excavation having been removed, the grocery was abandoned. According to Vera Figner, Todleben escaped alive because he soon left the city for a post in Vilna.

The other attempt on the Czar's life was made that summer in the capital. It involved blowing up the Kamenny Bridge, as he crossed it on his way from the Tsarskoe Selo railway station to the Winter Palace. A team of activists, headed by Zhelyabov, managed to place in the water under the bridge four rubber sacks containing some two hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite and provided with detonators and wires. They fastened the loose ends of these to a float anchored nearby, on which women did their laundry. Acting on the intelligence that the Czar was expected to arrive in the capital from Tsarskoe Selo on 17 August, Zhelyabov arranged to meet Vasily Teterka. a labourer he had won over to the cause, at the bridge on that day. The latter was to bring with him a basket of potatoes, and Zhelyabov an electric battery. The two were to row out to the float, where Teterka was to go through the motions of washing the potatoes while Zhelyabov connected the wires with the battery. When the Czar's carriage was on the bridge, Zhelyabov was to detonate the charges.

It is not clear why the scheme fell through. One explanation is that Teterka, having no watch, was late for the appointment. The same day the Emperor left for the Crimea. He was accompanied by Princess Yuryevskaya, who, having been his mistress for fifteen years and having borne him three children, became his morganatic wife six weeks after the Empress's death -- to the scandal of the court circles.

There was something half-hearted about this last effort, and it was followed by a lull in terrorist activities. But this was not because Goldenberg's comrades shared his faith in 'the dictatorship of the heart.' In Narodnaya volya Loris-Melikov was described as a cross between a wolf and a fox. Nevertheless, it is possible that the People's Will deliberately refrained from action, waiting to see if the Government would at last take the road of democratic reforms.

The unacknowledged truce was short-lived. As winter approached, it was increasingly evident that nothing was to be expected from Loris-Melikov's 'bobtailed constitution' as, in a quatrain that was on everybody's lips, a humorist dubbed the plan for a General Commission. Long terms of hard labour were meted out to political offenders, and the treatment of the convicts was such that one of them committed suicide. In all, 127 politicals were tried in 1880, and at the end of the year 1,770 persons were under police surveillance. In October sixteen terrorists who had been arrested at various times during the preceding twelve months faced a Petersburg military court. Many of the charges against them were based on Goldenberg's disclosures. Two of the defendants were hanged on 4 November. As long as there had been some hope that the sentence would be commuted, the hands of the Executive Committee were tied. Now it was free to act again. Zhelyabov testified that the hangings 'were hailed with joy, in spite of the fact that the death of the two men tore out the very nerves, as it were, of the Party, while the commutation of Adrian Mikhailov's death sentence was met with undisguised chagrin.' [Adrian Mikhailov, who had driven the carriage in which Kravchinsky escaped after killing Mezentzev, was condemned to hang, but the sentence was changed to a term of hard labour because he had turned informer, a fact that was not known to his comrades at the time.]

The proclamation issued by the People's Will on the occasion of the double execution urged its members to store up their strength, for 'the hour of judgment is not far.' The phrase had a clear meaning: the assassination of the Czar. All other tasks were pushed into the background. The enterprise had now become an obsession with most of the members of the Committee. They were no longer able to reason about it. Zhelyabov, for one, behaved like a man in a trance, as though under the urgency of an outside force. Yet they were by no means free from a gnawing sense of the futility of their undertaking.

In the early winter it was resolved to make one more attempt, the seventh since the Odessa project the previous year, to explode a mine in the Czar's path. A team of observers, reporting to Sofya Perovskaya, ascertained that on Sundays he usually attended the trooping of the colours in the Mikhailovsky Manege, a score of blocks from the palace, and that he was driven there up the Nevsky and along Malaya Sadovaya. Work was started on a plan to mine this side street.

In the midst of these preparations the organization suffered a crushing blow: at the end of November the invaluable Alexander Mikhailov was arrested. He had ordered a number of photographs of the two men who were hanged from a commercial studio, the owner of which was a secret service agent, and was seized when he called for the pictures. Although he had sensed that there was something suspicious about the place, he failed to live up to his own precept of unremitting caution and walked into a police trap like the merest tyro.

Shortly before he faced the court, with nineteen other defendants, over a year later, he admonished his comrades in letters not to be tempted by thoughts of vengeance or by beautiful theories. 'In Russia,' he wrote, 'there is only one theory: to win liberty in order to get land.' The only way to do it, he asserted, was 'to strike at the centre,' i.e., at the occupant of the throne. He and nine of his comrades were condemned to die. He had long been used to the thought of death, and during the fifteen months of solitary confinement he had succeeded in overcoming the last vestiges of aversion to it. The trial itself was a happy experience, for it gave him a chance to profess his deepest convictions freely. On the eve of the day when he expected to be executed he tasted intense exaltation. He pictured himself on the scaffold among comrades all calmly facing the end, and saw his own state in 'a most iridescent light.' It seemed to him that if he had been a composer, he would have produced immortal music that night. 'Involuntarily,' he wrote to his sister, 'you come to believe in the presence within man of that heavenly fire which, at such cost to himself, Prometheus ravished and gave to humanity.' Then euphoria yielded to serenity. An hour after midnight he went peacefully to sleep.

He woke up in the morning in the same placid mood. The news that in his case the Emperor had substituted a life term of penal servitude for the death penalty left him indifferent. But as the days went by and he remained in the dark as to the fate of his comrades, he was seized with anguish. He could not bear the thought that he alone had been spared. As a matter of fact, all the death sentences, except one, had been commuted. Instead of being shipped to Siberia, Mikhailov was incarcerated in the Alexis Ravelin of the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Less than two years later he sickened and died there.

II

On 2 December, a three-room front basement on Malaya Sadovaya Street was rented by Yevdokim Kobozev, tradesman, in reality Yury Bogdanovich, member of the Executive Committee. A dynamite charge under the roadway was again to be tried, but it was to be combined with a new form of attack: several bombs were to be tossed at the Czar's carriage, should he survive the explosion. Kibalchich and Isayev, another Party technician, had succeeded in producing such a missile. Finally, if both methods failed, Zhelyabov was to assail Alexander with dagger and pistol. The combination of mine, bomb, pistol, and dagger gave the conspirators the feeling that this time Alexander could not escape alive.

On New Year's Eve some of the activists who were in the capital got together to celebrate. Gleb Uspensky, the writer, was the host. The gathering was meagrely but genuinely gay. The life of the party was Zhelyabov. Sablin, who had acted the part of a grocer in Odessa, told anecdotes from the life of the clergy. Gesya Helfman made music on a comb. She was a homely girl with a high-pitched voice and a constant smile, who had run away from an Orthodox Jewish home at sixteen to avoid marriage to a groom chosen by her parents. There was singing and dancing: quadrilles, lancers, and the native trepak, a gallopade with plenty of stamping. Isayev made so much noise that the neighbours protested. He took off his shoes and kept it up. One guest did not join in the fun: she had witnessed the execution of Lizogub, and her imagination was fitting the shroud now to one, now to another dancer. A similar gathering had greeted the coming of the previous year. On that occasion the ghost of Nicholas I had informed the company through the instrumentality of an improvised ouijah board that his son would die by poison.

On 8 January, 1881, Bogdanovich and his 'wife,' the Anna Yakimova who had played the part of Zhelyabov's spouse at Alexandrovsk, moved into the basement on Malaya Sadovaya. The couple opened a cheese store in one room and used another as living quarters. It was from there that the digging was started. Ten men, including Zhelyabov, lent a hand at various times. Operations went on smoothly until a wooden sewer was cut into, and the tunnel was filled with an over-powering stench. Nevertheless the work went on and late in February a passage of some fifteen feet extending to the middle of the street was completed.

While preparations for the dynamiting were in progress, experimentation with a hand bomb was also going forward. It was conducted by Kibalchich and Isayev, the Party's best technical brains. Who was to throw the missiles? Four men were selected: Ignaty Grinevitzky (Party name: 'Pussy'), twenty-six years old, a former engineering student, stocky, good-natured, taciturn; Timofey Mikhailov, a boiler maker, twenty-one years old; Ivan Yemelyanov, a boy of twenty, who after graduating from a trade school, had studied abroad on a grant from Baron Ginzburg, and was now a cabinetmaker; Nikolay Rysakov, a nineteen-year-old student. All were members of a 'fighting squad' formed as an adjunct to a workers' group primarily to carry on 'economic terror': to use strong-arm methods on informers and unpopular foremen. Zhelyabov was to testify in court that the Executive Committee had called for volunteers from the several 'squads' in existence and that forty-seven men had signified their 'willingness to sacrifice themselves.' He was generally candid in his testimony, but in this case he must have deviated from the truth. If he had all those volunteers to choose from, it seems odd that he should have selected Rysakov, a mere boy who had recently fallen under his influence. The People's Will was to pay dearly for having entrusted so dangerous a task to this raw youth.

One evening in mid-February the four bomb-throwers gathered in a newly rented kvartira on Telezhnaya Street, tenanted by Sablin and Gesya Helfman. Zhelyabov outlined the plan of attack, and Kibalchich lectured on the bomb -- there was something professorial about this quiet man, with his lean, bloodless, sharp-nosed face and his habit of screwing up his eyes, which often had a faraway look. He demonstrated parts of the mechanism for the class, drew diagrams, described how the bomb worked and how it should be handled. The missile was a cylindrical affair weighing five to six pounds, the outer shell fashioned out of an empty kerosene can, and the explosive a combination of nitroglycerin and pyroxilin. Shortly after the meeting the bombs were tested in a suburban park. Two missiles were pitched, and one of them exploded.

Meanwhile, the affairs of the Party were going from bad to worse. It was using up its principal, as Zhelyabov put it. In addition to intelligence obtained from Goldenberg the previous year, the police now had the services of another informer: the young carpenter, Okladsky, who had taken part in the attempt at Alexandrovsk. Arrest followed upon arrest. Early in February Kletochnikov was trapped by gendarmes. The conspirators felt surrounded. Nerves were on edge. Then came the heaviest blow of all: in the evening of 27 February Zhelyabov was arrested in the lodging of an incautious comrade.

The shattering news reached Vera Figner the next morning. With Isayev as her 'husband' she was occupying a flat, which was the headquarters of the conspiracy. Later in the day word came that the cheese store had been visited by the police. It was a house search in the guise of a sanitary inspection. For some time the establishment had been under suspicion. The owners looked the part of petty tradespeople, he with his massive beard and his face the colour of a brass samovar, she with the manner and speech of a country wife, but they acted queerly, and there were too many young men coming to the basement at night. As it happened, luck was with the plotters: the examination of the premises was so perfunctory that the excavation was not discovered. This in spite of the fact that a barrel and a tub in the store were filled with earth from the tunnel; that in the storeroom, too, there were sacks and boxes packed with earth, as well as heaps of it barely covered with straw or coke and mats; and that there was earth under the sofa in the living-room. For the moment the situation was saved, but it was obvious that the police had an eye on the place.

That afternoon all the members of the Executive Committee who could be reached met at headquarters. The situation that confronted them was a dismal one. Kletochnikov, the Party's shield, was gone. Zhelyabov, the heart of the conspiracy, was behind bars. The police were clearly closing in on them. True, the Malaya Sadovaya excavation was completed, but the explosive had not yet been placed in it. And not a single bomb was ready. Kibalchich, phlegmatic and absent-minded as usual, had been dilatory, perhaps not quite trusting the child of his brain. The culmination of the long effort, on which so many hopes were centred, hung by the thinnest of threads. A slight mishap might mean the final collapse of the enterprise for which so much had been risked and for which men had gone to the gallows.

In these desperate circumstances the Committee decided to act. Isayev was instructed to lay and wire the mine on Malaya Sadovaya. The meeting adjourned at three p.m. and two hours later in the same quarters work began on the bombs. The task was entrusted to Kibalchich, who had just returned with the prospective bomb-throwers from testing a half-loaded missile in an unfrequented spot beyond the Neva. Vera Figner and Sofya Perovskaya also made themselves useful. The four bombers were told to report the following morning, 1 March, at the Telezhnaya Street flat. It was expected that on that day, as on two previous Sundays, the Emperor would be driven to the Manege to witness the trooping of the colours.

That night Grinevitzky set down what was in effect a letter to posterity. Only a fragment of it has been preserved. 'Alexander II must die,' he wrote. '. . . He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too. . . . How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? . . . It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me. . . .'

Next day, by eight a.m., after fifteen hours of feverish, uninterrupted work, four bombs were ready. There was no explosive for any more, nor would there have been time to manufacture them. The men would have one apiece. Perovskaya took two missiles to the Telezhnaya Street quarters, and later Kibalchich carried the other two there. Grinevitzky, Mikhailov, Yemelyanov, Rysakov were there, waiting. They were dismayed to hear that Zhelyabov had been arrested. Perovskaya was now in command. She outlined the plan of action and drew on an envelope a rough chart of the streets adjacent to the Manege, marking with circles the spots where the bomb-throwers were to be stationed. It was believed that the Emperor would be driven up the Nevsky and along the mined block, which opened onto a small square in front of the Manege. Two men were to loiter at the corner of the Nevsky and Malaya Sadovaya Street, and two were to stand at the other end of the block, near the square. At the sound of the explosion all of them were to close in on the Czar's carriage from opposite directions and use their bombs if he was still alive.

Of course, he could take a different route, turning into Bolshaya Italyanskaya (now Rakov Street) which runs parallel to the Nevsky, thus avoiding the mined block. In that case no attack was to be made in the Manege Square, since it would be full of people. Instead, Perovskaya would walk past the men and by taking out a handkerchief and blowing her nose signal to them that they should abandon their posts and proceed to the Yekaterininsky (now Griboyedov) Canal, in the hope of attacking the Czar on his way back.

About an hour before noon all the conspirators filed out of the flat, each of the chosen four carrying a bomb wrapped in a handkerchief or a newspaper. There was little time to lose. The Emperor usually left the Palace in the early afternoon.

Since the previous night the mine on Malaya Sadovaya had been in place. On completing the work, Isayev had withdrawn. Sunday morning Bogdanovich too left the store, Yakimova alone remaining behind. Later in the morning she was joined by Frolenko. The imperturbable Ukrainian had been selected to turn on the current that would detonate the mine. The hope was that, being a stranger to the place, he might be able to get away in the confusion following the explosion. Yakimova, for her part, was to warn him of the approach of the imperial party and then leave without waiting for the mine to go off.

III

On Sunday morning, 1 March, the Emperor was in excellent spirits. Count Valuyev, who had an audience with him in the forenoon, noted in his diary that he hadn't seen the sovereign looking so well in a long time. The previous day, after the imperial family had attended Lenten service and taken communion, word had come that the redoubtable Zhelyabov had been arrested. This was glorious news. The cloud of fear under which the Czar and his wife had been living was at last lifting. Soon the rest of the terrorists would be rounded up. He felt a sense of well-being so keen that it frightened him. Nevertheless, Loris-Melikov, arriving about noon, pleaded with him not to leave the palace that day. The Minister spoke of rumours of another attack. After some hesitation, the Czar decided to attend the parade at the Manege. Their leader gone, he argued, the terrorists must have abandoned their plans. As a matter of fact, this view was shared by the security forces. That very morning the chief of police told his men that all was going well and that it was only necessary to seize two or three more conspirators to put an end to sedition for good and all. Thus Zhelyabov's arrest indirectly contributed to the success of the enterprise he had captained.

The Czar left the Palace in his two-seater drawn by a pair of horses a few minutes before one o'clock. It was a raw day; snow lay on the ground and was heaped up along the sidewalks; low clouds blanketed the sky. He had promised his wife that he would avoid Nevsky Prospect and the Malaya Sadovaya block with that peculiar cheese store. It filled her with apprehension, in spite of the fact that, as Loris-Melikov had assured her, the police found nothing suspicious there. Accordingly, the Emperor ordered his coachman to drive along Yekaterininsky Canal and up Bolshaya Italyanskaya. He was in the habit of naming the route at the last moment, so that no one knew it beforehand. Perovskaya was hanging about the Manege Square and two men with bombs were stationed nearby. They made no move to attack the Czar: there was still the possibility that on his way back he might drive past the cheese store.

At the Manege, Alexander watched the manoeuvres of two Guard battalions with obvious pleasure. He had a smile and a gracious word for his brother, Constantine, and the other dignitaries in his entourage. The brilliant ceremony lasted no more than thirty or forty minutes.

What route would he take on his way back? The terrorists waited feverishly for the answer. His carriage rolled down Bolshaya Italyanskaya, rendering the mine useless. This was Perovskaya's clue to give the signal that was to send the men with the bombs to the Yekaterininsky Canal. As she passed Grinevitzky, he gave her a barely perceptible wink.

Had the Czar driven home directly, he would have passed the quay before the bombers had time to reach it on foot. But he didn't. He paid a brief visit to his cousin, the Grand Duchess Catherine, and this enabled the men with the bombs to take up their new positions. Only three of them did so: Timofey Mikhailov lost his nerve, took his missile back to Headquarters and went home. Astonishingly enough, none of the plotters, each carrying a queer parcel, attracted the attention of the police stationed along the Sovereign's route.

Emerging from the gates of the Duchess's palace, the Emperor's carriage proceeded at a clip down Inzhenernaya Street. On the box next to the coachman sat an orderly, and the vehicle was guarded by six mounted Cossacks. The rear was brought up by three sleighs, carrying Colonel Dvorzhitzky, district chief of police, and two officers of the Gendarmerie, charged with the security of the Emperor.

At the end of the block the two-seater turned right, on to the quay. It had gone little more than a hundred and fifty yards when it encountered a thick-set youth in a fur cap. This was Rysakov. He moved closer to the roadway and threw his bomb -- it looked like a large snowball -- between the horse's legs. It was then two-fifteen p.m.

There was a loud explosion, a spray of snow, earth and splinters fanned out from a spot on the pavement, and the scene was filled with bluish smoke. One of the Cossack escorts lay motionless on the ground, and nearby a butcher's boy, who had been on his way to deliver an order, was writhing and groaning. Both of them had been severely wounded and soon died. When the bomb went off, Colonel Dvorzhitzky's team reared and came to a sudden stop. He jumped out and hurried over to the Czar's carriage which had halted not many yards away. He was in time to help his Sovereign step out. The Colonel took in the situation at a glance: the floor and back of the carriage were shattered, the window panes broken, the orderly wounded, the Emperor himself, somewhat dazed, had suffered a slight cut on one of his hands, but was otherwise unharmed. He crossed himself and inquired if the criminal had been seized. The Colonel satisfied him on that score. Glancing back, he had noticed that several policemen and soldiers were holding a man pinned against the iron railing along the edge of the quay. This was indeed Rysakov. An eyewitness reported that on leaving his carriage, the Czar bent over one of the wounded. The coachman begged his master to get back into the carriage, but as it did not look safe, Dvorzhitzky took the liberty of offering to drive the Czar to the Palace in his sleigh. The Emperor consented, but said he wished first to have a look at his assailant.

By now not only policemen, but soldiers, sailors, cadets, and civilians were milling around on the quay. The Czar, flanked by Dvorzhitzky and the Cossack guards leading their horses, walked up to Rysakov. According to Dvorzhitzky, Alexander merely inquired about the youth's identity and turned away without a word. Another eye-witness thought he saw the Sovereign wag a threatening finger at his assailant.

The Colonel again urged the Czar to get into his sleigh and drive on to the palace. Alexander reflected a moment and said he wanted to have a look at the spot where the explosion had occurred. He walked over to the funnel-shaped pit formed by the bomb. The Cossack and the boy were still lying where they had fallen. He expressed solicitude for them.

His curiosity satisfied, he was ready to drive away. The delay amounted to five or six minutes. He had taken only a few steps when he came within two or three paces of a man leaning against the railing with a parcel in his hands. The man turned to face the Emperor and made a sudden movement. There was a second deafening explosion.

When the smoke cleared, on the dirty, blood-stained snow, pocked with splinters and littered with shreds of clothing, shoe leather, and other debris, lay nearly a score of wounded, moaning, crawling, trying to rise. Because people had crowded close to the Czar, the second bomb claimed many more victims than the first. On the shattered flagstones of the sidewalk near the railing the Czar crouched in a pool of blood. He was bare-headed, his fur-trimmed cloak and the uniform of the sappers of the Guard that he was wearing were in rags. His legs were splintered below the knee and blood was gushing from the wounds. Beside him lay his attacker, Grinevitzky, also gravely wounded and unconscious. Dvorzhitzky was in the same state but soon recovering consciousness, heard the Czar call weakly for help. The Colonel managed to lift him and with assistance place him in his own sleigh, but no one had sufficient presence of mind to see that he got first aid.

Alexander continued to bleed so profusely that the sleigh left a bloody trail as it made its way toward the Palace. When he was finally placed on a couch in his study and a physician summoned, his condition was hopeless because of loss of blood. He seemed to rally and received Holy Communion. At three-forty p.m. the flag flying over the Winter Palace was lowered to half mast.

At nine o'clock Grinevitzky, who had been carried to the infirmary attached to the Palace, regained consciousness. Determined to give no information to the police, he refused to disclose his name. An hour and a half later he was dead. His identity was established only posthumously. Of the innocent bystanders injured by the second bomb only one was wounded fatally. The affair of 1 March cost fewer lives than the Winter Palace explosion.

When Rysakov saw that the Czar was hurt, he expressed satisfaction, which earned him a punch in the head from one of the soldiers holding him. But he was turned over to the authorities unharmed.

The moment the second bomb went off, Yemelyanov, who was stationed some twenty paces down the quay, rushed to the scene of the explosion to see if Grinevitzky was alive and could be spirited away in the confusion. He realized at once that nothing could be done. Then, on impulse, he approached the Czar -- he claimed to have been the first at his side -- and helped prop him up in the sleigh. He did this with the bomb wrapped up in a newspaper under his arm. Then he made his way unmolested to the flat on Telezhnaya Street and turned in the missile.

IV

When Kibalchich and Isayev, who had been loitering near the Manege, found that the Emperor had not driven past the cheese store, they decided that the affair was a fiasco. Aloof and abstracted as ever, Kibalchich went to his furnished room and it was only in the evening that he learned of the event he had done so much to bring about. Isayev made his way to headquarters and reported failure. Vera Figner then went out to pay a visit, and while at her friend's learned of the Czar's death. She hurried back to the flat, where several comrades were gathered. Tears were in the eyes of all those present. Of that incredible moment she wrote later: 'The nightmare that had weighed down on Young Russia for ten years had vanished. . . . The Czar's blood shed by us had redeemed all the horrors of prison and exile, all the brutality and cruelty inflicted on hundreds and thousands of our comrades, all the blood of our martyrs, everything.'

Sofya Perovskaya was not at headquarters. Aside from the members of the bombing squad, she was the only conspirator to witness the attack. Standing on the other shore of the narrow canal, she had seen all that had happened on the quay. Straight from that scene she went to keep an appointment with two students. As she quietly entered the cafe where they were waiting, her bloodless face betrayed no emotion, and there was the usual concentrated look in her eyes. As yet she was unaware of the fatal outcome of the bombing. When she learned of Alexander's death, her exultation was crossed by deep anguish: Zhelyabov was in the hands of the enemy. The immense pressure under which she lived in the hours immediately following his arrest had riveted her mind to the tasks at hand. But now her thoughts turned to him. She was not unaware that the police dossier contained much against him, but it was possible that the authorities had no evidence of his connexion with the assassination. And, of course, he hadn't actually taken part in it.

Then came the news that he had confessed to having been responsible for the act. She read about it in an extra she bought as she walked along the Nevsky with a comrade. Clearly the fate of her beloved was sealed. Even at that terrible moment she did not lose hold of herself. She only lowered her head and slowed her pace, mechanically clutching the narrow sheet. 'Why did he do it?' asked her companion. 'I suppose it was necessary,' she replied.

Was it necessary? Interrogated immediately after his arrest, Zhelyabov answered the question about his occupation by declaring: 'I am employed in liberating my country.' He admitted membership in the People's Will -- in subsequent statements he described himself as an agent of the Executive Committee -- and he confessed to having organized the attempt at Alexandrovsk. He must have believed that Goldenberg had disclosed the fact to the police.

On Sunday afternoon, on his obligatory walk in the prison yard, he listened for the sound of an explosion. He did not hear it, and went to bed unaware of what had happened. At two a.m. he was aroused from sleep and brought face to face with Rysakov. They made no attempt to conceal that they knew each other. Zhelyabov was then told of the assassination and presumably of Rysakov's part in it. So this lad, a raw recruit whom he had only recently brought into the ranks, was the only one of those directly implicated in the affair to have been seized. Could he possibly let him take his punishment alone? Rysakov may have already worn the crestfallen look that presaged his breakdown.

Zhelyabov did not try to hide his joy at the momentous news from his captors. A giant step, he said, had been taken toward the liberation of the people. If he had not actually been involved in the attack, he declared, it was only because he was behind bars, but morally his participation was beyond question. And he added a threat: 'If, with the ascension of Alexander III to the throne, the Party's expectations are not fulfilled and if it meets with the same treatment as before, it will not hesitate to attempt his life, too.' The gist of these remarks he incorporated in a formal deposition. In another statement, dated 2 March, he explained that he had sponsored Rysakov as a regicide because he believed the youth to have 'the makings of a calm, manly terrorist and to be a person of rare moral strength.'

On the same day he addressed this communication to the public prosecutor: 'If the new sovereign, having received the sceptre from the hands of the revolution, means to follow the old system of treating regicides, if the intention is to execute Rysakov, it would be a crying injustice to spare my life, since I have made repeated attempts on Alexander II and since I did not actually take part in assassinating him merely because of a stupid accident. I demand to be included among those indicted in connexion with the affair of 1 March, and, if necessary, I will make such disclosures as shall convict me. I request that this statement be given appropriate consideration.' He added the following postscript: 'I am troubled by the fear that the Government, putting legality above justice, will adorn the new monarch's crown solely with the corpse of the young hero for lack of formal evidence against me, a veteran of the revolution. I protest against such an eventuality with all the strength of my soul and demand justice for myself. Alone, the cowardice of the Government will account for one gallows, not two.'

That very day Rysakov began to inform against his erstwhile comrades. What he said enabled the police to raid the Telezhnaya quarters the next night. Gesya Helfman alone was arrested, as Sablin killed himself after firing several shots at the gendarmes. The following morning Timofey Mikhailov was seized after he had wounded three police officers. Rysakov identified both prisoners.

In the weeks that followed, the frightened, bewildered boy continued to tell everything he could recall about his comrades. His experiences on the quay had had a shattering effect on him. He had envisaged the assassination of the Czar as a radiant event certain to work a magic transformation of life. Instead, he saw blood flow and heard the death rattle of innocent victims. He also discovered that his political convictions were rather shaky. And his questioner, the same astute detective who had handled Goldenberg, persuaded him that complete frankness would save mm trom the noose. He did try to justify his behaviour. He hinted that while he was still at liberty he had lost faith in terror. He argued lamely that he had joined the group in the hope of putting an end to terror, both red and white, and of preventing the horrors of a popular rising. And he blamed Zhelyabov for having misled him. Alleging sincere repentance, he said that he had turned against his former comrades in order to atone for his crime.

The Executive Committee had intended to maintain the cheese store with a view to using the mine eventually against the new Czar. The idea was given up after the Telezhnaya quarters had been discovered. On 3 March the couple who ran the establishment abandoned it, and the next morning the police searched the premises. On the counter they found one rouble left to pay the butcher for meat that had been bought for the cat. They also discovered the mine. This heightened the tension in the city. There were wild rumours of new plots. Cossack troops patrolled the streets. Railway stations and trains were watched, and so were roads. Wholesale house searches were conducted and arrests made under the slightest pretext.

Meanwhile a change had come over Sofya Perovskaya. Her composure and self-control were gone. She alternated between hope and despair, between apathy and furious activity. She was no longer the professional revolutionary for whom the cause was the be-all and end-all. She was possessed by the idea of arranging for Zhelyabov's escape. She made plan after plan, one more reckless and fantastic than the last. She had lost her head. She would not hear of leaving town, as her friends urged her to do. She grew neglectful of the most elementary rules of precaution. It was as though she craved to share the fate of her beloved.

Before long her unconscious wish was granted. On 10 March she was seized as she was being driven along the Nevsky. She had been spotted by the proprietress of a dairy who had known her as a customer. Rysakov established her identity and described the role she had played. She made no attempt to contradict him and readily signed a full confession. Rysakov also identified Kibalchich, who was arrested a week later. Speaking with perfect detachment, the latter calmly admitted his guilt. As a matter of fact, his mind was not on the subject. He was at this time deeply absorbed in designing a flying machine. As soon as he was installed in jail, he went on with his diagrams and calculations, using the walls of his cell until paper was brought to him. In the wake of his arrest came the capture of Frolenko.

V

At first the authorities had intended to try Rysakov alone. But as they gained a fuller insight into the plot that had resulted in the Emperor's death, it was decided to have a group trial. Four men: Zhelyabov, Rysakov, Timofey Mikhailov, Kibalchich, and two women: Sofya Perovskaya and Gesya Helfman, were to be arraigned before a tribunal made up of senators and representatives of the estates of the Empire. The case was to be heard in public.

In a communication addressed to the presiding Senator, Zhelyabov denied the competence of the court on the ground that it was an interested party. He demanded a trial by jury. The jurors, he concluded, were certain not only to acquit him and his comrades, but to offer them the gratitude of the fatherland. After due consideration, the court overruled this objection, and Zhelyabov accepted the ruling.

On 26 March the defendants faced their judges. The trial was conducted in strict accordance with legal procedure. The accused were provided with counsel, except for Zhelyabov, who chose to conduct his own defence. When the defendants were asked about their occupation, Perovskaya and Helfman replied: 'Revolutionary affairs,' while Zhelyabov said: 'I served the cause of the people's liberation. For many years this was my sole occupation, to which I am devoted with my whole being.' Concerning his religion he stated that he adhered to the essence of Christ's teaching, and believed that it was the duty of every true Christian to fight for justice, for the rights of the oppressed and the weak, and, if necessary, to suffer for it.

After the bill of indictment was read, the prisoners were given a chance to explain their motives and state their views, as well as to confirm or modify their pre-trial testimony. All admitted membership in 'The Russian Social-Revolutionary Party' and, except for Mikhailov and Helfman, pleaded guilty of participating in the assassination of the Emperor. They made no effort to withhold damaging evidence. It is certain that these confessions were not extorted by means that in our day have been brought to such perfection by totalitarian regimes. They were made freely in proud defiance of the enemy. Foreign observers of the trial were amazed at the readiness with which the accused acknowledged their guilt and detailed their clandestine activities. An editorial writer of the New York Herald, in commenting on 10 April, 1881, on this disposition of 'the nihilist' to gratify 'the excusable curiosity of justice in regard to all he has done,' concluded that there existed 'some profound and radical difference between Russian nature and human nature generally as known in our part of the world.'

Although the accused made it easy for the prosecutor to ascertain the facts of the case, the State produced over sixty witnesses. The prosecutor's oration, which lasted for hours, rose to its rhetorical peak when he voiced his horror at the crime of 1 March. In dealing with the case of Gesya Helfman he made no attempt to turn anti-Jewish prejudice to account. He found all the defendants guilty as charged and deserving the supreme punishment. Then the lawyers for the defence spoke. Mikailov's counsel offered the curious argument that since his client did not seem to prize his life, he should not be deprived of it. Zhelyabov, speaking as his own counsel, was at pains to lay bare the conditions that turned peaceful propagandists into terrorists. Necessity alone, he repeated, had forced him to use violence.

The prisoners were entitled to a last word before judgment was pronounced. Rysakov was incoherent. All through the trial he looked like an ill-prepared schoolboy at an examination. Kibalchich, composed as ever, took advantage of the opportunity to mention his flying ship.

The trial reached its expected denouement at three a.m., 29 March, when all the defendants were found guilty, and at six-thirty a.m. they were sentenced to be hanged.

They did not exercise their right of appeal. Kibalchich was refused permission to consult a member of the committee that was studying his paper on a flying machine. He had handed it to the authorities and was told that it had been turned over to experts for examination. As a matter of fact, it was sealed up in an envelope, which lay in the police archives unopened for thirty-six years. Published in 1918, it proved to contain a suggestion for the application of the rocket principle to aviation -- hardly a contribution to aeronautics, since it did not even attempt to solve the engineering problems connected with the construction of a rocket plane.

As the trial was drawing to an end, Vladimir Solovyov, a young instructor at the University of Petersburg who was to become Russia's greatest systematic philosopher, suggested in a public lecture that the Czar, as a Christian and ruler of a Christian nation, ought to forgive his father's assassins. He was wildly cheered by some of his hearers. An appeal to the same effect was made by Tolstoy. He anticipated the outcome of the trial with dread. One afternoon he dozed off and dreamed that he was at once executioner and executed. Waking from his nightmare, he wrote to Alexander III, urging him to summon the regicides, give them money and send them away somewhere, say to America. Whether or not the letter reached the addressee, he was not likely to have heeded it. In reply to Pobedonestzev, Procurator of the Holy Synod, who had warned him no! to yield to counsels of Christian extremism, Alexander III wrote: 'I give you my word that all six will hang.'

One of the six did not hang. The day after the end of the trial Gesya Helfman informed the authorities that she was with child. The court postponed her execution until forty days after her delivery, and in July the Emperor, chiefly to placate foreign public opinion, commuted her sentence to hard labour for life. She gave birth to a girl in a prison hospital, and it is alleged that the baby was provided with a luxurious layette by an anonymous American donor. Gesya died a few months later, under circumstances suggesting malpractice by the Court accoucheur who had delivered her, and the infant did not long survive her. It was never seen by the father, a member of the Executive Committee, who was also to die in prison.

The execution of the other five was set for 3 April. The previous day Rysakov offered his services to the police in a last desperate effort to save his neck. His plea was ignored. Kibalchich composed a long communication to the Czar in an effort to suggest 'a peaceful way out of the present impossible situation.' Sofya Perovskaya's last extant letter is addressed to her mother. 'Believe me, dearest Mummy,' she wrote, 'my lot is not at all such a dark one. I have lived as my convictions have prompted me; I could not do otherwise; therefore I await what is in store for me with a clear conscience.'

In the evening the Church offered its ministrations. Both Zhelyabov and Perovskaya refused to see a priest. Kibalchich engaged the Father in a dispute and would not be shriven. Mikhailov made his confession. Rysakov confessed and received the Eucharist.

The next morning the hangman and his assistant placed the condemned in two tumbrils and strapped them to their seats with their backs to the horses. On the chest of each hung a placard with the single word: 'Regicide.' By eight o'clock the carts were jolting over the cobblestones, on their way to Semenovsky Square, where the execution was to take place. Rysakov^ head was bent, the others appeared self-possessed. A disdainful smile contorted Perovskaya's pinched, slightly flushed face. Mikhailov, his massive form bulking large, kept bowing to the people, as was customary for those on their way to the scaffold. He shouted to them, but his words were drowned out by the drummers who formed part of the military convoy. To at least one sympathetic eye-witness the condemned looked like victors riding in triumph. Carriages occupied by five priests brought up the rear of the procession. The mood of the crowd that lined the route of the cortege was far from friendly. Indeed, two young women who waved handkerchiefs at the condemned would have been torn to pieces by the mob, if not for the intervention of the police.

At eight-fifty the tumbrils reached the square, a vast un-paved plaza, and a muffled murmur rose from the crowd, estimated at a hundred thousand by the correspondent of the London Times. Lumbering down an aisle flanked by Cossacks, the cart? drew up in front of a scaffold surmounted by gallows, which loomed black against a clear, pale sky. The wooden structure was surrounded by troops. The hangman, with four helpers, unstrapped the prisoners and led them to the pillories in the rear of the scaffold. Zhelyabov kept turning his head to Perovskaya, who stood next to him. The air of detachment and imperturbable calm did not abandon Kibalchich. Rysakov was deathly pale. Big Mikhailov wore a petrified look.

An official read the verdict from a low platform nearby, the paper shaking in his hand. The priests mounted the scaffold. All the condemned kissed the crucifix, and the priests, having signed them with the cross, withdrew. Then they kissed each other good-bye, but Perovskaya turned away from Rysakov. The hangman and his helpers slipped over each of the condemned a loose garment which covered the head and face. Rysakov's knees gave way. All the while the drums kept up a steady rumble. The hangman took off his blue peasant coat, revealing his red shirt. He was ready for business.

The first to be hanged was Kibalchich. Mikhailov was second. Twice the rope broke under the weight of his big body and he crashed to the floor of the scaffold with a thud. In the half century and more that had elapsed since the execution of the Decembrists the efficiency of the executioners had not noticeably increased. The crowd that had been so hostile to the regicides a few minutes earlier was now buzzing with indignation and saying that it was a sign from heaven that the man should be pardoned. As the rope was about to break the third time, the executioner hastily reinforced it with another noose. It worked. The hanging of the remaining three prisoners went off without a hitch. Rysakov had to witness the execution of all his companions before being dispatched to his own death.

At nine-fifty the bodies were cut down from the gallows and placed in the black wooden coffins that had been waiting for them. They were buried in a nameless common grave.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar14.html

* * *

Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 15

A Pyrrhic Victory

The more sanguine among the terrorists had hoped that the execution of the Czar would touch off a mass uprising. The soberer souls had expected that the authorities would be frightened into liberal reforms, which would facilitate the work of the Party. On the other hand, conservatives had predicted that should the plot against the Emperor succeed, the enraged populace would exterminate the revolutionaries and indeed make short shrift of the educated class from which they stemmed. The course of events belied all expectations.

Immediately after the explosions there was great excitement in the streets of the capital, but it was brief, and before midnight Nevsky Prospekt had assumed its usual look. At first the officers in charge of the troops garrisoned in the city were vaguely apprehensive of trouble in the ranks. Nothing untoward happened. The soldiers cursed the assassins, and by ten o'clock all were snoring. On 2 March Count Valuyev wrote in his diary: 'Our army is still healthy. . . .'

In the days that followed, a few students were manhandled by ruffians, perhaps not without police connivance. Two men who bought a portrait of the deceased monarch and tore it up in the street were beaten within an inch of their lives by passers-by. A group of shopkeepers, in a letter published in the newspapers, dared the terrorists to come out into the open and promised to lynch them. For a while students avoided wearing their uniforms in the street, while young women let their hair grow and put on kerchiefs. Wild reports about plots and reprisals were in circulation. But both rumours and acts of violence soon ceased. Moscow and the provincial cities remained quiet. Of course, there was a plethora of protestations of loyalty to the throne on the part of public bodies.

In the countryside on the whole the news was met with puzzlement or composure verging on indifference. A widespread notion was that the Czar had been murdered by the gentry because he had been on the side of the people. For a while a district in the province of Tver was an unhealthy place for a traveller who looked like a barin (master). The villagers were apt to stop his carriage, smash the bell on his shaftbow, and beat him up. According to a correspondence printed in Chornyi Peredel, it was rumoured that the new Czar had turned all the mileposts between Petersburg and Moscow into gallows for the murderers of his father, that he had confiscated their lands and would distribute them among the peasants on the day of his coronation.

If the response of the masses was disappointing to the People's Will, that of the intelligentzia was no more encouraging. True, at the University of Moscow the attempt of some students to collect money for a wreath to be placed on the Czar's coffin resulted in disturbances which led to the expulsion of over three hundred youths, and in Kazan, while the citizenry was taking the oath of allegiance to Alexander III, hundreds of students attended a meeting on the campus, at which the late Czar was excoriated and monarchic government condemned. Several zemstvo and municipal boards and even one or two assemblies of nobles respectfully urged the Emperor not to deviate from the path of reform followed by his august father. Two or three newspapers made bold to express themselves in a similar vein. On the other hand, it soon became apparent that the event of 1 March had frightened and alienated many of the liberal fellow travellers. In sum, nothing approaching a revolutionary situation developed as a result of the assassination.

Naturally, the few groups of intellectuals and workmen who moved within the orbit of the People's Will and Black Repartition were deeply stirred. They wanted to know what was coming next; they offered their services. Eager for action, some of the factory hands that had been proselytized by Zhelyabov turned to Sofya Perovskaya for guidance. Before she could respond, she was behind bars. The Executive Committee, which was rapidly depleted by arrests, had scanty funds, no arms, no plan and could furnish no leaders to the rank and file. All it did was to print several leaflets, one of them urging all and sundry 'to send petitions from towns and villages.' The Party had scored a brilliant victory, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Nikolay Sukhanov, a rather flighty naval officer who had been co-opted by the Committee from the military branch of the organization, proposed an immediate attack on the life of Alexander III. The proposal could not be seriously entertained. Instead, Tikhomirov, who had had no hand in the assassination, suggested an appeal to the new ruler. The Committee consented, though without enthusiasm.

'The Letter from the Executive Committee to Alexander III,' dated 10 March, is couched in respectful, if forthright, language. It indicates that there are two ways out of the existing situation: revolution or 'the voluntary turning of the sovereign to the people.' It is curious how tenaciously the Russian radical mind clung to the idea that the autocrat was capable of becoming the people's Czar, a 'crowned revolutionary,' as Herzen had put it a generation earlier. To avoid the fearful waste and suffering entailed by revolution, the Committee urges the Emperor to choose the second alternative. 'As soon as the Government ceases to be arbitrary and resolves to carry out the demands of the people's conscience and consciousness, you can get rid of the spies, send your bodyguard back to the barracks, and burn the gallows that deprave the people. The Executive Committee will disband of its own free will. . . . Peaceful efforts will replace violence, which is more repugnant to us than to your ministers, and which we practise from sad necessity.'

Speaking to the Emperor as to 'a citizen and a man of honour,' the Committee sets forth the measures that would make it abdicate as a revolutionary body. They are two: political amnesty and the calling of a Constituent Assembly charged with the task of 'reviewing the existing forms of political and social life and altering them in accordance with the people's wishes.' Also, to insure freedom of elections, civil liberties must be granted, but only as 'a temporary measure.' Apparently it was held that the Constituent Assembly, might regard civil liberties as too much of a luxury. This peculiarly moderate programme is followed by a solemn declaration that 'our Party' will unconditionally submit to the decisions of the Assembly. 'And so, your Majesty, decide,' the letter concludes. There are two ways before you. The choice is yours. We, on our part, can only beg of Fate that your mind and conscience prompt you to make a decision consistent with the good of Russia, your own dignity and your duty to our country.'

Thirteen thousand copies of this communication were run off, and a few copies, intended for the Emperor and the highest official, were printed on special paper.

The hangings on Semenovsky Square were a reply to the Committee's letter. Another, and equally unequivocal answer came at the end of April.

It will be recalled that less than a fortnight before his death Alexander II had endorsed Loris-Melikov's plan for a General Commission. Half an hour before he started on his fatal trip to the Manege, he approved the text of a manifesto announcing the establishment of the Commission. The approval was tentative, for he ordered the document read, possibly for reconsideration, at a session of the Council of Ministers to be held 4 March. He seems to have had misgivings about his action. After the Minister left, he turned to his sons and said: 'I have consented to this measure, although I do not conceal from myself the fact that this is the first step toward a constitution.'

He had no sooner breathed his last, than those at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy were ranged in two opposed camps. One was headed by Loris-Melikov; the other, by Pobedonostzev, recently appointed Procurator of the Most Holy Synod. He had been a tutor to the Heir Apparent and had maintained a hold on his former pupil. On the evening of 1 March, the thirty-six-year-old Alexander III sobbed on the Procurator's shoulder 'like a big baby.' Pobedonostzev spared no effort in trying to win over the Emperor to a programme of intransigent absolutism. Not concessions to public opinion, he argued, but a policy of 'blood and iron' would destroy the evil seed of sedition. Loris-Melikov must be dismissed, he insisted, and indeed, the whole administration purged from top to bottom, for treason lurked everywhere. A prime necessity, he repeated, was immediate and firm action, putting an end to the prattle about liberty and representative government.

At first the Emperor did not show his cards. He gave Loris-Melikov no reason to doubt the security of his position, although the Minister realized that the event of 1 March was a grave blow to his prestige. Nor was he apprehensive about the fate of the General Commission, for the Czar as heir had been a member of the committee that favoured the creation of that body. Both at home and abroad it was generally expected that the new reign would witness the beginning of representative government in the Empire. In fact, the aged Emperor Wilhelm wrote to Alexander III describing 'the underwater reefs one must steer clear of in granting a constitution.'

The General Commission came up for consideration on 8 March at a meeting of Ministers presided over by the Czar, and was quickly shelved by him, after Pobedonostzev had violently attacked the measure. In the ensuing weeks there was some uncertainty as to the course the Government would follow. And then, on 28 April, the Council of Ministers was confronted with the printed text of an Imperial manifesto, composed by the Procurator, which was promulgated the next day. The Emperor had approved it without consulting his Ministers, in flagrant violation of a decision adopted a few days previously. It proclaimed the Czar's determination to govern 'with faith in the might and justice of Autocratic Rule, which for the good of the people we are called to strengthen and defend from any encroachment.'

Loris-Melikov's first reaction on reading the manifesto was that it had been faked by the revolutionaries in order to arouse widespread indignation. He resigned, and several other administrators followed suit. They were replaced by advocates of reaction and repression. Pobedonostzev's triumph was complete. Commenting on the manifesto, the London Times wrote that it 'rudely shattered the hopes aroused by the new reign.' A statute issued in August was, as one historian put it, 'the Magna Carta Libertatum granted to the police against the citizenry.' The course that was to be followed for a generation was set. The People's Will had offered the Czar two alternatives. He made his choice.

II

The blast on Yekaterininsky Canal was heard round the world. The press lamented the loss of 'a far-seeing and beneficent prince,' as the New York Herald had it, and Government bodies, including the Senate of the United States, extended official condolences to Alexander III. A small segment of the public, however, felt differently. Marx and Engels hailed the assassination as an event that 'must inevitably lead, even though after prolonged and cruel struggle, to the creation of the Russian Commune.' In London, Copenhagen, Vienna, Chicago, public meetings were held to celebrate the triumph of the Russian terrorists. On 15 March (New Style) four hundred persons gathered in New York at the Steuben House on the Bowery, listened to speeches in English, German, Polish, and Russian, and 'in the name of humanity' adopted a resolution congratulating the world on 'the overthrow of the absolutism of feudal autocracy in Russia' and the people of Europe on 'the removal of the greatest obstacle to the establishment of the Western Republic or the United States of Europe.'

The press accounts of the trial of the regicides made the names of Zhelyabov and Sofya Perovskaya known far and wide. While to many they meant the horrors of 'nihilism,' a few pronounced them with reverence. A California newspaper carried a ballad by Joaquin Miller, entitled 'Sophie Perowskaja,' [From The Californian the poem was reprinted in the New York Herald, 31 July, 1881, and it figures, minus two initial stanzas, in The Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller under the title, 'The Dead Czar.'] the concluding stanza of which read as follows: The Czar is dead; the woman dead,

About her neck a cord.

In God's house rests his royal head --

Hers in a place abhorred.

Yet I'd rather have her bed

Than thine, most royal lord!

Yea, rather be that woman dead,

Than this new living Czar,

To hide in dread, with both hands red,

Behind great bolt and bar --

While, like the dead, still endless tread

Sad exiles tow'rd their star.

One of the first steps taken by the Executive Committee after 1 March was to issue a statement to the Western public, which described the execution of the Czar as an episode in the struggle against a despotism that injured not only the Russian people but all mankind. The Committee's letter to Alexander III made a favourable impression abroad. Marx and Engels found it proved that there were 'people with a statesmanlike bent of mind' in the ranks of the Russian revolutionaries. Yet the Party failed to take advantage of this fund of sympathy on the part of the liberal and radical circles in the West. It received no help from abroad. And that in spite of the fact that several emigres publicly championed the terrorists and that it had its own emissary in foreign parts.

One of the aims of the People's Will was to dispose Western public opinion in its favour. Several men identified with the revolutionary struggle in Russia and articulate enough to reach a foreign audience lived abroad, but they all objected strongly to one or another feature of the Party's programme or tactics. As a result the organization turned, in May, 1880, to an expatriate settled in Geneva, who was a relative stranger to the movement. This Mikhail Dragomanov, a former professor at the University of Kiev, whom Zhelyabov had known in his Odessa days, was a Ukrainian nationalist of democratic sympathies. As he found the People's Will too centralist to suit him and as he abhorred terror, he refused to plead the Party's cause before the European public. The Executive Committee then decided to make one of its members ambassador to the West. Leo Hartmann, who had taken part in the Moscow attempt on the life of Alexander II, was selected for the purpose. The choice was anything but a happy one.

The credentials issued to him under date of 25 October, 1880, charged him with the task of informing and winning over public opinion abroad by means of meetings, lectures, and articles in the press, and empowered him to collect funds for the revolution, including contributions from workers for Russian strikers. He crossed the border safely and went to Paris. He seems to have done nothing in France to carry out the tasks entrusted to him. On 3 February, 1881, he was arrested at the request of the Russian authorities. Because of public agitation, however -- in which Victor Hugo participated -- he was not extradited, but merely expelled from the country. Thereupon he crossed over to London, where he frequented the households of Marx and Engels. He made vast plans for raising funds and for publishing an English daily entitled Nihilist, which was to come out 'at the same hour' in London, Paris, and Geneva, and become the main source of information about Russia for the West. None of his schemes materialized.

On 6 June, 1881, Marx was writing to his eldest daughter: 'Hartmann left for New York on Friday, and I am glad he is now out of danger [he had apparently been threatened with extradition]. Several days before his departure he asked Engels for the hand of Pumps [a niece of Engel's wife; a brainless, pleasure-loving young thing whom the couple were bringing up], declaring that he was sure of Pump's consent. She did indeed flirt violently with him, but that was merely to arouse Kautsky. And Tussy [Marx's youngest daughter] has just told me that the same Hartmann had proposed to her before he left for Jersey. But the worst thing is that the famous Perovskaya, who died for the Russian revolution, had lived with Hartmann in a free union. . . . From Perovskaya to Pumps -- that's too much, and Mama is now disgusted with him and the entire male sex.'

It will be recalled that Hartmann and Perovskaya were the 'married' couple that had occupied the house in the Moscow suburb from which mining operations were conducted. Either Marx misunderstood the situation or was misled by Hartmann.

He landed in New York early in July and made no secret of the nature of his mission. The papers carried long interviews with him, articles over his own signature in the form of letters to the editor, as well as the text of the appeal of the Executive Committee to the American people, which he had brought with him. 'The abolitionists,' it ran, 'were your dearest and best sons. . . . We are the Russian abolitionists. . . . Your sympathy, like that of other nations, is dear to us.' To secure it, the document went on, Leo Hartmann had been dispatched to the hospitable land of America so that its people might get acquainted with 'the condition of affairs in Russia.'

The emissary of the People's Will told the readers of the New York Herald (29 July) through his interviewer that the success of the 'nihilist' movement was assured, since it had the support of all classes of the population. 'Has not one of your noblest and best citizens,' he exclaimed, 'has not Wendell Phillips publicly expressed his respect and sympathy for the nihilists? Has he not spoken the noble words: "If liberty cannot be gained by any other means but the dagger, then welcome the dagger!"?' The following day in the columns of the same paper Hartmann offered a highly coloured account of his career and a defence of terrorism. A fortnight later he again wrote at great length to the editor of the Herald. Among other things, he asserted that the late Czar had twice tried to expatriate himself, but was prevented from doing so by the Executive Committee, which was in fact the real government of Russia.

At the time when this letter was printed, its author was in Canada. When he had first arrived in the United States he had been assured by a lawyer that his extradition to Russia was out of the question. He had disregarded the demands voiced in certain Republican newspapers for his surrender to Russia, but became alarmed when Assistant Secretary of State Hitt was quoted in the press to the effect that the extradition of a would-be regicide was not ruled out. Secretary of State Blaine disavowed his subordinate's opinion, but was rather evasive about the matter. Thereupon Hartmann became something of a storm centre. The newspapers collected opinions of jurists on his extradition. A large meeting of protest against it was held in Brooklyn. Wendell Phillips accused the Secretary of State of being ready to act as 'sheriff to the Czar.' The World contended that 'in the sight of George III George Washington was as atrocious a criminal as Hartmann.' On the other hand, the Tribune wrote of him (on 10 August): 'He deserves no more pity or protection than the snake whose head it is the right and duty of humanity to crush.'

Hartmann did not long remain under the protection of the British flag. The issue of the Herald of 17 August carried a letter from him to the effect that he had returned to New York ready to contest his extradition. A week later he was writing to Engels that Russia had demanded his surrender, but that he was hopeful, since he had the support of Wendell Phillips, John Swinton (an editor of the Sun, described by Engels as 'an American Communist') and other 'big people.' As a matter of fact the Russian authorities did not apply for his extradition. Instead, they spread a report that the person who claimed to be Hartmann was an impostor and that the real Hartmann was in Russia and had offered his services to the police as an informer.

When Hartmann had first been interviewed he told the Herald reporter that he would soon return home 'to continue to the end the struggle against despotism.' He mentioned this on several other occasions. Yet on 19 August, to everyone's amazement, he declared his intention of becoming a United States citizen. Nothing is known about his further efforts, if any, to carry out his mission. The following year he showed up in London, but he returned to the States and spent the rest of his days there. It is said that he worked in a machine shop and then went into business for himself as a manufacturer of electric appliances, inventing a tie pin with a tiny bulb that could be turned on. He died in New York or Florida at a ripe age.

III

In the weeks that followed the event of 1 March the situation of the People's Will deteriorated rapidly. The rounding uo of activists proceeded apace. The police made good use of the information supplied by Goldenberg and Rysakov. In March alone nearly fifty men and women were put behind bars. In ferreting out and identifying revolutionists, the secret service was assisted not only by Okladsky, the carpenter who had participated in the Alexandrovsk attempt and who, as has been said, had turned informer on being arrested, but also by another one of the workmen whom Zhelyabov had proselytized. Accompanied by a detective, this Merkulov walked the streets of the capital and pointed out men and women to be seized. One of his first victims was Yemelyanov, the only member of the bombing squad to have survived. On 1 April, Isayev, the Party's sole remaining technician, was arrested. Before the end of the month Lieutenant Sukhanov and Anna Yakimova -- the latter had run the cheese store on Malaya Sadovaya -- were caught in the dragnet. In May the secret press was discovered.

Meanwhile the Emperor had retired for safety to the town of Gatchina, where he kept himself practically incommunicado in the gloomy palace erected by his great-grandfather Paul. It was not until April that he felt sufficiently secure to make his first public appearance by reviewing a military parade.

The membership of the Executive Committee had by now dwindled to five men and three women, of whom one, Maria Oshanina, was seriously ill. The auxiliary forces at the disposal of this handful of not particularly effective people had also shrunk. The situation had been anticipated by Zhelyabov. At one of the meetings of the committee shortly before his arrest he had observed that whether or not the attempt on the Czar's life succeeded, after it was over most of the participants in the attack would be casualties. The gathering was attended by two organizers who had come from Moscow, where they had succeeded in forming a fairly strong group with cells in factories and schools. Zhelyabov had shown great interest in their report. He wanted to have all the details. What was the quality of the human material in Moscow? Would it be able to carry on, once the Petersburg centre was smashed? 'Remember,' he had told the pair, 'if your Moscow doesn't come to our rescue, it will go badly with us.'

Moscow did attempt to come to the rescue, but failed. In the summer the headquarters of the People's Will were transferred to that city. The removal was an admission of defeat. Vera Figner called it 'exile.' Opposition to the existing order centred in the northern capital, which, besides being the seat of the Government, was the brain of the country. No other city possessed its material and spiritual resources. None other had a revolutionary tradition going back to the Decembrists. But the police in Moscow were less vigilant than in Petersburg, and for some months the tiny contingent of revolutionaries carried on in relative safety. Their financial situation improved, and a new secret press was set up, so that the printing of leaflets and of the Party organ was resumed. The gaps in the membership of the Executive Committee, however, remained unfilled. The immediate result of the shift of headquarters to Moscow was the weakening of the local organization, some of whose active members were dispatched to other centres.

The few groups that marched, or rather marked time, under the populist banner of Black Repartition, were also hit by arrests. The organization had hailed the assassination of the Czar jubilantly. Paradoxically enough, the leaflets it issued on the occasion were less moderate in tone than the proclamations of the Executive Committee. The burden of their message to the people was: 'If you want land and liberty, take them by force.' The Union of Southern Workers, which gravitated toward Black Repartition, announced in a proclamation dated 14 March that it had sent to the Emperor a demand for the enactment of a number of reforms, including an eight-hour workday. 'We shall wait a month for an answer,' the leaflet concluded. 'Should we convince ourselves that we can get no help from the new Czar either, then we will act on our own, and let the blood shed by us be upon the heads of those who could have brought about reconciliation, but did not.' The Union was boasting when it spoke of shedding blood. It was moribund and soon vanished from the scene.

Not many months had elapsed after the assassination of the Czar when the thin ranks of Black Repartition were ready to pursue political objectives, though assigning them a secondary role. The issue of Chornyi Peredel, dated September, 1881, while making it clear that political democracy was not the aim of the People's Party, conceded that such a regime had its points. The time seemed ripe for the two factions to reunite, on a platform combining political and economic demands. But the merger did not take place, perhaps because Black Repartition was in an advanced, stage of disintegration. In fact, it did not survive the year. The issue of Chornyi Peredel, dated December, 1881, was the last. Thereafter only a few scattered groups, clinging to the tenets of orthodox Populism, carried on socialist propaganda in the provinces.

Axelrod, like Plekhanov, and other leaders of Black Repartition, had remained abroad. Vera Zasulich had been with them since the previous year. Yakov Stefanovich, who had long felt that they should all return to Russia and compose their differences with the People's Will, was the exception. By September he was in Moscow and a member of the Executive Committee. A few other adherents of the populist faction joined the People's Will, without, however, strengthening that organization to any marked degree.

Vera Figner, arriving in Moscow from the South in the late autumn, found a distressing state of affairs. The Executive Committee was no longer a fighting body. It could only carry on propaganda and organizational work. Morale was so low that precaution was thrown to the winds -- with disastrous results. Alone, Tikhomirov ostentatiously wore mourning for Alexander II and further to avert suspicion went on a pilgrimage to a venerated shrine. 'Both brain and brawn were lacking,' wrote Vera Figner retrospectively, 'there were neither leaders capable of initiative nor skilful executants.'

IV

As yet the authorities were unaware of the extent to which their adversary had been weakened. They did not question the ability of the Executive Committee to carry out the threat of renewed terrorism implied in its public pronouncement. This may be inferred from the fact that the Government aided and abetted, if it did not actually initiate, a quasi-secret society of militant monarchists. This so-called Holy League (Svyashchenaya Druzhina) was a voluntary association of men banded together to furnish a bodyguard for the Emperor, as well as to spy on the terrorists, infiltrate their ranks, sow discord among them, demoralize them, assassinate their leaders -- in a word, to combat the underground with its own weapons.

It came into being shortly after 1 March in an atmosphere of general distrust of the ability of the police to safeguard the Czar and cope with the menace of revolution. A minor railway official who years later as Count Witte, Prime Minister, negotiated the Russo-Japanese peace treaty, laid claim to having originated the idea of the League. Its statutes, dated 1 June 1881, provided for a centralized hierarchical organization of bewildering complexity, headed by a five-man Council of First Elders. The Czar's brother, Vladimir, may have been a First Elder.

The League affected the secrecy of a conspiratorial society and the ritualism of a Masonic lodge. Each member ('brother') through a ceremony of initiation, in the course of which he took an oath in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to dedicate himself wholly to 'the protection of the Sovereign and the eradication of sedition, which disgraces the Russian name.' The brethren were recruited from among the higher officialdom, the aristocracy, the world of finance. The exclusive Yacht Club in the capital served as headquarters, and there were branches in Moscow and in several provincial centres. In October, 1881, the League broadened its base by forming the Voluntary Guard (Dobrovolnaya Okhrana), a semi-autonomous auxiliary society. If the League was an elite body, the Guard approximated a mass organization. Acting openly, though unofficially, the latter looked out for the safety of the Emperor and his family at home and on their travels. Such protection was also provided by the League. For this purpose both societies hired strong-arm men and detectives. Late in 1881 the League counted 729 brethren and the Guard no less than 14,672 members.

Large funds were at the disposal of the League. It had no other assets. Miserable bunglers were at the helm, and the ranks were infested with patrioteers, promotion seekers, and shady characters interested in easy pickings. In co-operation or competition with the regular secret service, the organization carried on extensive espionage at home, and since it believed, quite mistakenly, that the terrorist activities were directed from abroad, it maintained a network of sleuths in Paris and Geneva. Huge sums of money were spent, reams of paper covered with reports, every trick of the trade was used, even to the employment of a Mata Hari -- all to no purpose. Arrangements for the assassination of Hartmann and Kropotkin also came to nothing. There was something of opera bouffe about the League's enterprises. Needless to say, its existence was an open secret, although no mention of it was permitted in the press. In commenting on its activities Narodnaya volya observed: The Government is openly taking the form of a secret conspiracy against the people's freedom.' The League was also out to combat the revolutionary movement 'ideologically.' To this end it maintained three periodicals. Two of them were printed in Geneva. Volnoe Slovo (Free Word), which began to appear in August, 1881, was intended to wage war on the People's Will from the point of view of moderate political radicalism. By disguising their identity, its backers were able to engage as editor Dragomanov, to whom Zhelyabov had appealed for help. Under the guidance of this sincere democrat it advocated a parliamentary and federalist regime for Russia. A year later another journal was launched under a title which the Bolsheviks were to make notorious: Pravda (Truth). It was a publication 'of the most fiery kind,' in the words of its editor, a former rural police officer first employed by the League as a detective. The wretched sheet passed itself off as the mouthpiece of a newly formed secret society with a programme which called for an orgy of destruction in the manner of Bakunin at his most ferocious. Pravda's favourite occupatior was baiting the League's other organ, in an effort to win the confidence of the extremist elements. The issues were filled with bloodthirsty abuse and invective directed against the secret police, the administration, and particularly the Czar and all his kin. The editor went out of his mind, he wrote to his superiors, as he reread what was printed in his journal about 'those dearer to him than life itself,' but was consoled with the reflection that this was done 'for a holy purpose and out of loyalty to the Sovereign.'

Furthermore, the League, acting through a dummy, resuscitated a progressive Moscow daily that the authorities had driven out of existence. In its columns liberalism was to be expounded, and then a blow was to be delivered to it by disclosing the identity of the paper's backers. This measure was not carried out, and the liberal cause suffered no damage. It was also planned to issue openly a journal of monarchist opinion, but this, strangely enough, never materialized.

By means of these publications the League hoped to discredit the doctrine of revolutionary Populism and demoralize the membership of the Party. There was also the hope of infiltrating the Executive Committee and the ranks of the liberals, who were suspected of having an organized core affiliated with the underground. None of these assorted objectives was achieved. The editor of Pravda had a vision not only of gaining entree to the inner sanctum of the People's Will, but indeed of heading the Party, with a view to delivering it into the hands of his employers. As a matter of fact, he didn't come near a single activist. In a joint statement the more prominent political emigres publicly repudiated both the programme and the tactics of Pravda. All that the League's inept Machiavellianism succeeded in doing was to poison with mutual suspicion the atmosphere breathed by the handful of Geneva expatriates.

The constituted authorities supported the League, but at the same time held it in suspicion, in spite of its credo. For was it not, after all, a manifestation of public initiative? A close watch was kept on its activities. The regular secret service eyed the organization's members and agents with mingled hostility and contempt as competitors and meddlesome amateurs who helped rather than hindered sedition. Its venture into underground journalism was a farce. Most of the copies of the Geneva publications that were smuggled into Russia were destroyed by its own agents in obedience to an unfathomable logic. Some of the literature did get through to the public, not without unlooked-for effects.

As the months went by, the enemies of the League grew in number. Apparently the suspicion arose that some of its leaders intended not to destroy the revolutionary movement, but to use it, together with the League's machinery, in order to advance their political ambitions, that they had, indeed, entered into a secret alliance with the revolutionaries. The possibility is not excluded that some highly-stationed 'brethren' were not averse to seeing their monarch's authority limited by an aristocratic constitution. Others may have gone even further. Prince Meshchersky, who dabbled in literature, published a satirical tale, the hero of which, a transparent caricature of one of the pillars of the League, dreams of becoming Prime Minister, perhaps president of the Russian Republic. The book is said to have been called to the Czar's attention by Pobedonostzev. Allegedly one of the most exalted leaders of the organization, the Procurator of the Holy Synod now sharply turned against it.

On 23 November, 1882, he addressed a forceful message to the Emperor, warning him that the League in its arrogance was about to make the position of the legitimate Government impossible. 'As I look around me,' he concluded, 'the conviction grows upon me that great as is the danger to you from the conspirators, the danger from the Holy League is even more serious.'

Yielding to pressure from this and other foes of the League, the Czar acted without delay, and by the end of the year the organization was liquidated. A little later its organs folded up. The Voluntary Guard lasted until the coronation which took place on 15 May, 1883. Thus ended the grand effort of the Russian aristocracy to defend the principle of monarchy.

V [This section, with some changes, was printed in The Chicago Jewish Forum.]

Before proceeding with the account of the waning fortunes of the People's Will, something should be said about an episode that chroniclers of the Russian revolutionary movement have tended to slur over.

In the spring of 1881 a wave of anti-Jewish riots swept over Southern Russia. Before the end of the summer pogroms had occurred in over a hundred localities. Later there were more disorders, and only in 1884 did mob violence cease. The pogroms were not spontaneous outbreaks. That they should have followed closely upon the death of Alexander II was no accident. The smoke had scarcely lifted over the scene of the assassination when a certain portion of the press began to point an accusing finger at the Jews. There is reason to believe that a campaign of incitement and provocation was conducted by forces intent on diverting the attention of the masses from the real causes of their misery, though exactly who the instigators were is not known. It may have been the work of the Holy League. Certainly the guardians of law and order were guilty of inaction and, in some cases, of connivance with the rioters.

At the outset, officialdom promoted the idea that the pogroms had been fomented by the revolutionaries to give the masses an object lesson in rebellion, or as a convenient way of starting a general upheaval. The view had a brief but considerable vogue. It figured in a report from the United States Minister in Petersburg to the Secretary of State. Writing on the subject of the anti-Jewish riots on 24 May, 1881, John W. Foster observed: 'It is asserted that the nihilist societies have profited by the situation to incite and encourage the peasants and lower classes of the towns and cities in order to increase the embarrassment of the Government. . . .' He went on to say, however, that the charge was 'not based on very tangible facts.' Count Kutaisov, the official investigator of the riots, denied that the social-revolutionary party had instigated the anti-Jewish movement. Another theory then won approval in high places: the Jews themselves were to blame; they had brought down on their heads the wrath of the masses whom they had been plundering.

A former student who was under police surveillance reportedly attempted single-handed to launch a pogrom in Yekaterinoslav in order 'to arouse the masses to protest against exploitation.' Such incidents must have been exceedingly rare. Unquestionably neither Black Repartition nor the People's Will had a hand in starting the riots. It is equally certain that not a few radically-minded individuals condemned the pogroms on both humanitarian and political grounds. Yet it is a fact that at least initially the prevalent attitude in revolutionary circles was one of sympathy with the perpetrators, not with the victims of the looting and the butchery, and indignation was likely to be directed chiefly at the police for manhandling and arresting the rioters. The wish being father to the thought, the pogroms appeared to be a prelude to a broader movement, indeed a harbinger of the revolution. For here was an authentic mass protest, violent, unbridled, sweeping aside the barriers of law. The Jews were attacked not so much on racial or religious as on economic grounds, people argued, for were not these money-lenders and venders of vodka a set of exploiters battening on the body of the people? It was held that the movement was bound to grow in scope and reveal its revolutionary nature. 'The Party,' wrote a commentator on the subject in Narodnaya volya, 'cannot take an indifferent, let alone negative, attitude towards a genuinely popular movement. The French Revolution,' he added, 'had its excesses, but its leaders did not therefore repudiate it.'

A leaflet issued by the South Russian Workers' Union mildly upbraided the rioters for attacking the Jews 'indiscriminately,' pointing out that not all of them were exploiters. Zerno, the journal sponsored by the Black Repartition, sounded a similar note and reminded its readers that the workers, irrespective of nationality and religion, must unite against their common enemy. In the same breath, however, it described the outbreaks as just retribution and made the point that only the rich with their minions had interceded for the Jews. 'The anti-Jewish movement,' runs a passage in the Bulletin (Listok) of the People's Will, 'which was not originated or shaped by us, is nevertheless, an echo of our activity.' The tenor of the discussion indicates that this statement is a claim to credit. Its anti-Jewish animus finds further expression in the charge that to win over the wealthy and the powerful, the Jews were deliberately spreading the idea that the mobs were bound to turn against the Gentile propertied classes. Leo Hartmann, soon after his arrival in New York, contributed to the local German Socialist paper an article in which he wrote: 'It is a fact that in South-Western Russia the Jew is not only the pothouse-keeper and money-lender, but also for the most part a secret service agent.'

Clearly, the attitude toward the pogroms reflected a readiness to welcome the revolution, no matter what ugly guise it took. But the anti-Jewish prejudice also counted for a great deal. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in Russia as elsewhere, extreme Radicalism was sometimes tinged with anti-Semitism. Bakunin, for one, was not free from it. In 1876 a narodnik of Jewish birth complained of its presence among his comrades. 'They make no distinction between Jews and gentry,' he wrote, 'preaching the extermination of both.'

There was but a step from the hopeful view of the riots to an attempt to exploit them for the benefit of the cause. This step the revolutionaries did actually take. While the reactionaries would use Jewish blood to put out the fire of rebellion, an interested contemporary observed, their adversaries were not averse to using it to feed the flames. A proclamation of the Executive Committee, dated 30 August, 1881, told the Ukrainian masses in their own vernacular that the Jew was their worst enemy. They were everywhere, 'the vile Judases' that had grabbed everything both in town and country; they had bought the officials; the Czar was the landowners' Czar, but also the Jews' Czar. When the people attacked their exploiters, he brought in soldiers, and Christian blood flowed. 'You have already begun to rise against the Jews,' the leaflet concluded. 'That is fine. For soon a revolt will start all over Russia against the Czar, the landowners and the Jews.'

The leaflet was the work of a member of the Executive Committee who eventually deserted the revolutionary camp for that of black reaction. It is reported that the Committee's imprimatur for this proclamation was obtained by 'trickery' and that its circulation was soon stopped. Yet Narodnaya volya, No. 6, dated October, 1881, carried a discussion of the anti-Jewish movement by the same writer and of the same tenor. What is more, the Ukrainian leaflet was reprinted the following year by a local group of the People's Will. Though ever formally repudiated, it was implicitly disavowed in the leading article of Narodnaya volya, No. 8/9, dated February, 1882. Nevertheless another leaflet in the vernacular, bearing the imprint of the People's Party and dated 18 March, 1883, urged the people to recall their glorious ancestors who had driven the Jews and the gentry out of the Ukraine with fire and sword.

In the summer the Executive Committee issued a proclamation which was so distasteful to the couple who operated the pess -- the wife was a Jewish woman who had embraced Christianity in order to contract a fictitious marriage -- that they ran it off under protest and without the Party imprint. The sheet blamed the Jews for the pogroms and condemned the authorities for putting them down by force. In discussing the disorders in another Party publication, a contributor noted indignantly that in one town the troops had fired on the rioters, and expressed the hope that the news would reach other towns and start riots there, too. 'We do not think that the disorders will achieve their end,' he admitted, 'but we rejoice in the educational effects of such occurrences.' Disregarding the experience of the preceding three years, he persisted in conjuring up a vision of the mobs turning on their other enemies, once the Jews had been disposed of. 'Let us remind our readers,' he wound up, 'that the French Revolution, too, began with massacres of Jews (Taine). It is a sad fate, which is apparently unavoidable.' On an earlier occasion a similar reflection had been offered the pogrom victims as solace in the organ of Black Repartition.

The following year the People's Will once more reversed itself, branding the anti-Jewish outbreaks as 'an erroneous formula,' that could not benefit the people and admitting that in this matter the judgment of the revolutionaries had been hopelessly clouded. They had at last freed themselves from the aberration which had led them to condone what August Bebel called 'the socialism of fools.'

The emigres showed themselves to be less opportunist and politically immature regarding the Jewish question. Alone, Tkachev's Nabat perceived in the pogroms all the symptoms of an approacning social revolution. The 1881 leaflet caused dismay and indignation among them. Under the fresh impact of the pogroms, Plekhanov had started an essay on Socialism and Anti-Semitism, but gave it up, becoming 'unbearably ashamed,' as he put it later, 'of demonstrating elementary truths.' Axelrod proposed that the Executive Committee publish a pamphlet addressed to the Jews to reassure them morally and to show them that not everyone was against them. As such a publication did not materialize, he began an article on the Jewish question in which he advocated, among other measures, a systematic campaign against anti-Semitism by the revolutionary factions. His comrades objected. Lavrov wrote to him guardedly that it was difficult for Russian socialists to take a stand in the matter because they had to have the masses on their side. Lev Deutsch, in a postscript to Lavrov's letter, dotted the 'i.' The revolutionaries, he conceded, must fight for racial equality, but to take such an idea to the masses would be impolitic: the peasants would say that the socialists had not only killed the Czar, but also sided with the Jews. He admitted that the situation chagrined him, but he personally felt no obligation toward his fellow Jews: he was above all a member of the Russian revolutionary party, and its interests were paramount.

His position was by no means typical. True, the revolutionaries of Jewish extraction at first apparently shared the attitude toward the outbreaks which prevailed in radical circles. But the fact that the riots had failed to assume a revolutionary character and that in the West, too, anti-Semitism was on the increase gave them pause. In some cases the result was a change of heart and mind. They discovered a new solidarity with their own people. 'Deep down in the soul of each one of us, revolutionaries of Jewish birth,' Plekhanov's wife was to recall, 'there was a sense of hurt pride and infinite pity for our own, and many of us were strongly tempted to devote ourselves to serving our injured, humiliated and persecuted people.' Jewish university students, long alienated from the ghetto, took a leading part in organizing self-defence units in Odessa, and demonstratively appeared in the synagogues on the fast-day proclaimed by the Rabbinate in protest against the pogroms. The assimilationist trend suffered a serious setback, and there were those who lost their enthusiasm for the revolution together with their belief in Socialism as a solution of the Jewish question.

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar15.html

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Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Chapter 16

The Agony of The People's Will

Late in 1881 a conference of activists was held in Moscow. The results of its deliberations were meagre. Undismayed by the failure of previous efforts in that direction, the Party resolved to set up a special organization, the Christian Brotherhood, to be made up of Old Believers and sectarians converted to the cause of revolution. In the name of this non-existent body, an encyclical was issued, in which the Czar's laws and regulations were declared 'contrary to God's commandments and the spirit of Christian teaching.' This was the last attempt dictated by the old notion that religious dissenters were particularly susceptible to revolutionary propaganda. Nothing further was heard of the Brotherhood.

The conference also decided to assassinate General Strelnikov, the exceptionally brutal prosecuting officer in the military courts of the South. All the preliminary preparations were made by Vera Figner, who had in fact proposed the measure, and on 18 March, 1882, in Odessa, an agent of the Executive Committee, fatally wounded the General. Khalturin, who two years previously had blown up the Winter Palace, was waiting in a carriage nearby to drive the assassin to safety. Both men were seized on the spot and hanged four days later under assumed names -- they had refused to disclose their identities.

Few other acts of violence were carried out or attempted during the lifetime of the People's Will. The work of the Party was practically confined to socialist propaganda among factory hands, conducted by a few local groups independently and without central direction.

When the Party's fortunes were at this low ebb there occurred a significant and rather paradoxical shift in its ideology. The issue of its organ dated 5 February, 1882, contained a striking statement. If the masses spontaneously effect a social revolution, at the time when the conspirators seize political power, the leading article read, then the task of the Provisional Government will be merely 'to sanction the economic equality wrested by the people from their age-old oppressors and exploiters.' But the people may fail to act. In that case the Provisional Government will not only establish a free political order but will make an economic revolution by abolishing the right of private property in land and other means of production. Only then will the Constituent Assembly be made up of 'true representatives of the people.'

The same stand was taken, and more boldly, in a letter that the Executive Committee addressed about the same time to 'emigre comrades,' urging them to return home and join the People's Will. 'We ascribe enormous importance to political power,' the communication read. 'The revolution will occur only when this power is in good hands, and that is why we strive to seize it. . . . Should we obtain it as a result of an overturn, we would not let go of it until we had assured the people a firm footing.' The Committee hastened to add that it did not intend to perpetuate this 'tutelage of the people,' but it was vague about the conditions under which the Party would be ready to turn the reins over to the Constituent Assembly. The long missive ended on a Machiavellian note: for fear of repelling the moderates the addressees were requested not to expatiate in public on the seizure of power, 'at least not in our name.' [In her reminiscences, published in 1926, Anna Pribyleva, a then surviving member of the Executive Committee, argued that the letter was spurious.]

Two years later in an article entitled 'What Are We to Expect from the Revolution?' Tikhomirov stated that while the Party wished to secure political power, it had no intention to use it in order to force the benefits of Socialism or Communism on the people. This denial notwithstanding, it would appear that in its decline the People's Will was headed by persons no longer committed, as most of them had been in the past, to the plan of either compelling the Czar to liberalize his regime or replacing it with a Provisional Government which would forthwith hand over its power to a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. Instead, the leadership had developed a leaning toward the 'Jacobin' programme first broached in the Young Russia manifesto back in 1862 and later advocated by the Tkachev faction: that of seizing power by conspiracy and bringing Socialism into existence by decree -- a programme which adumbrated the Bolshevik revolution. Maria Oshanina asserted that the members of the Executive Committee toward the end of its existence 'had all become Jacobins, more or less.'

The letter to 'the emigre comrades' was addressed chiefly to the handful of former leaders of Black Repartition who stayed abroad. As a matter of fact, the Tkachevist trend in the Executive Committee was no news to them. The previous autumn a communication from Stefanovich, who had returned to Russia, had apprized them of it.

The expatriates did not relish the message. They were moving toward a position resembling that of Western social democracy, which assumed a long interval between the political and the social revolution. Kravchinsky took a particularly dark view of the 'Jacobin' tendency. Its advocates, he said, were 'already getting drunk on the ambrosia of power. . . . They want power not for the cause, but for power's sake.' He was also extremely critical of the Committee's inclination to claim 'papal infallibility.' That disposition, he wrote to Axelrod, could do the Party the greatest harm, for its future largely depended on 'the right to free thought and free criticism. 'This right,' he observed with truly prophetic insight, 'is the only bulwark against that terrible development of centralism which, given Russian extremism, could assume monstrous proportions and kill everything that is alive.'

Nevertheless, the emigres' reply, though somewhat evasive, was that they would go home and lend a hand. But because of the wave of arrests that swept both capitals in the spring, they were advised to wait. A little later, the arrival in Geneva of a loquacious member of the Executive Committee opened their eyes to the lamentable state of the Party of which they had been unaware, and they chose to stay on abroad. They contented themselves with printing pamphlets for home consumption and collecting money for the Red Cross of the People's Will, a new organization dedicated to alleviating the lot of political prisoners. Vera Zasulich returned to Russia in 1905, dying fourteen years later, a bitter enemy of the Soviet regime. Plekhanov did not repatriate himself until the revolution of 1917, after an absence of thirty-seven years.

The talk about 'seizing power' verged on the ludicrous in view of the condition of the Party. The arrests just mentioned brought the activities of the Executive Committee to a virtual standstill. The printing-press had been given up. The police raided the flat where passports were forged and seized the forgers and their equipment. Maria Oshanina crossed the border, joining the ranks of the emigres, and so did Tikhomirov and his wife, in spite of Vera Figner's protests.

In the northern capital work continued a little longer. The leading figure in Petersburg was Mikhail Grachevsky, who had come to the fore after the event of 1 March. Owing to his efforts, the manufacture of dynamite was resumed in May. The following month, however, he and most of his comrades were in prison. Aside from those who had expatriated themselves the sole member of the Executive Committee now left at liberty was Vera Figner.

The arrests were due to the efficient detective work of Major Sudeikin, head of the secret service in the capital, of whom more will be heard later. With the death of Strelnikov, the revolutionaries saw in him the arch-enemy, as subtle as he was ruthless. They particularly resented his persistency in corrupting his captives. He would introduce himself to them as an old-time narodnik and a student of Marx, critical of the tactics of the People's Will but not of its aims. He made it a rule to urge every political he encountered to join the secret service, and he was not unsuccessful, especially with young people.

Vera Figner fully realized the seriousness of the situation. But she would not give up. After all, some local cells were still active. She took into her confidence a leading member of the Kiev group and another activist, a retired army captain, who had been a trusted agent of the Executive Committee. With the aid of these two men she set about restoring the core of the People's Will. A slight break in the clouds occurred when one of the Subbotina sisters, then an exile in Siberia, turned over to the Party the remnant of the family fortune, eleven thousand roubles, according to one statement. It was now possible to resume printing. In November a press was set up in Odessa.

In casting about for people capable of replacing the arrested members of the Executive Committee the trio turned their minds to the Party's Military branch. In April, 1881, it had lost two of its most active members -- one of them, Lieutenant Sukhanov, was subsequently executed by a firing squad. Nevertheless it continued to hold its own and indeed to grow. The fact that its numerical strength was not impressive did not daunt the leadership. This was given to formulating fantastic plans in the belief that a handful of resolute men in a commanding position could work miracles. For example, there was talk of seizing Kronstadt and the naval vessels stationed there and bombarding the capital.

The military organization had been set up to give support to a spontaneous popular uprising or, if that failed to materialize, to head an insurrection engineered by the Party. Since both eventualities had now moved off into the dim future, its existence seemed no longer justified. Vera Figner was not ready to suggest that it disband, but she felt no compunction about attempting to divert the best men in the military branch to more important tasks. Accordingly, half a dozen of them were requested to retire from the service, sever their connexion with the military organization, and join the Executive Committee. Only two men fell in with this plan. The situation at the centre did not improve. Behind a serene fagade Vera Figner was in a panic.

The authorities were still unaware of the helplessness to which their adversary had been reduced. The Executive Committee continued to loom as the general staff of a formidable force that was lurking in the shadows of the underground. Its very quiescence was ominous. Fearing that some act of violence might be perpetrated at the coronation, they conceived the notion of making terms with the revolutionaries for the cessation of terrorism at least until the ceremony was over. To that end the police approached more than one political prisoner, urging them to state the conditions of an armistice. These efforts came to naught. Yakov Stefanovich, who was arrested in February, 1882, would not speak for the People's Will. Another prisoner responded by writing a long memorandum in which he tried to convert Alexander III to Socialism, arguing that an autocracy could be a workers' as well as a feudal or bourgeois State.

Later in the year the negotiations were taken over by the Holy League. Two separate attempts to arrange a truce seem to have been made. An emissary of the organization actually came to terms with Lavrov, who was still regarded by the uninitiated as the head of the revolutionary movement. An elaborate agreement was drafted in Paris, as well as the text of a proclamation to be issued by the Executive Committee. There was an element of pure comedy in the proceedings: while Lavrov acted for a practically non-existent Party with which he was not affiliated, the man he dealt with, concealing the identity of his backers, spoke in the name of a wholly mythical Zemstvo Association. The pourparlers were suddenly broken off on the ground that the Association had lost its influence in high places.

While negotiating with Lavrov, the League was duplicating its efforts with the aid of an outsider, a journalist by the name of Nikolay Nikoladze. He was told by Count Vorontzov-Dashkov, Minister of the Court and one of the pillars of the League, that it might be able to persuade the Government to make certain liberal concessions in return for a temporary cessation of terror. Nikoladze then gained the ear of several left-wing authors, including Mikhailovsky. The latter travelled a thousand miles to Kharkov to lay the matter before Vera Figner. She was rather sceptical, suspecting a police trap. In any event, she could make no decision without the consent of the members of the Committee who were abroad. Accordingly, she sent a trusted agent to Geneva to consult Tikhomirov and the others.

The emissary arrived there about the same time as Nikoladze. The latter made contact with Tikhomirov and laid his cards on the table. Saying that he spoke for a group of politically influential personages, he asked on what terms the terrorists would agree to a truce. Tikhomirov was elated. An armistice would supply the Executive Committee with a plausible excuse for the inaction which impotence had forced upon it. In exchange for fictitious self-restraint, the Party would receive real concessions. This was a godsend.

As the price of the armistice Tikhomirov demanded that the coronation manifesto should include the following provisions: amnesty for political prisoners; civil liberties, specifically freedom of socialist propaganda; a larger measure of zemstvo and municipal self-government. Furthermore, he requested that Nikoladze's backers, by way of an earnest of their intentions, deposit the sum of one million roubles with some individual enjoying the confidence of the Party, this money to be forfeited if they failed to keep their side of the bargain. Also an important political prisoner was to be freed before the coronation.

The negotiations were proceeding smoothly when, in the last days of 1882, Nikoladze abruptly broke them off and returned to Russia at the request of the League. This is Tikhomirov's story. Nikoladze has it that an agreement had actually been concluded, but that on returning to Petersburg he was told by Vorontzov-Dashkov to drop the whole matter.

In undertaking his mission Nikoladze, who was a man of liberal views, had stipulated as his sole reward, irrespective of the outcome of his efforts, that Chernyshevsky should be included in the amnesty that was expected at the coronation. The amnesty granted in connexion with that event, which went off without a hitch on 15 May, 1883, failed to cover Cherynshevky's case, but some months later the exile was allowed to return to European Russia after his sons had addressed a petition to the Czar.

II

The Holy League had broken off negotiations with Lavrov and Tikhomirov because by the end of 1882 the authorities had lost interest in treating with the People's Will. The regular police had succeeded unaided not only in learning what the true state of the Party was, but also in taking over the little that remained of it. This is how it happened.

As has been noted, when Vera Figner found herself the sole active member of the Executive Committee she turned for help to two men. One of them was Sergey Degayev. Coming of a cultivated middle-class family, he, like his younger brother, Vladimir, fell under the influence of radical ideas, eventually joining the People's Will. Vladimir was in his teens when, early in 1881, he was arrested. He was questioned by Sudeikin himself and invited to enter the secret service. This he did, intending to step into the boots of Kletochnikov, who had just been seized. Of course, the shrewd detective saw through the would-be counter-spy. Far from being of help to the Party, the rather dull-witted boy may have been instrumental in causing the many arrests that occurred in February, 1882. In the spring Sudeikin dispensed with his service, and the following year Vladimir expatriated himself, eventually settling in the United States and repudiating the radicalism of his youth.

Sergey, born in 1854, graduated from a military college, but retired from the army at an early age and attended an engineering school when, at the end of the 'seventies, he first became involved with revolutionaries. He conducted propaganda among his fellow students and as a leader of the military organization of the People's Will stood close to the Executive Committee. He was implicated in the event of 1 March, having had a hand in the mining operations conducted from the cheese store. After the assassination of the Czar he remained active. When in the spring of 1882, it was decided to kill Sudeikin, he took part in shadowing the detective with whom he had become acquainted through his brother.

It must have given him great satisfaction to be chosen by Vera Figner as her associate. To be a member of the Executive Committee had long been his ambition. He believed himself destined to do great things. In his new role he took charge of a secret press in Odessa. Within a few weeks, on 18 December, he was in prison. He was seriously compromised and threatened with a term of hard labour. Sudeikin questioned him without witnesses and was gratified with the results.

A statement printed later in Narodnaya volya offered this explanation of Degayev's conduct: 'He took it into his head to buy the Government's gratitude at the price of betraying his former friends and its bitterest enemies, and then, having secured the complete confidence of the autocracy, to deal it a decisive blow when the occasion presented itself.' In his memoirs Tikhomirov presented Degayev's motive in a somewhat different light. According to him, Degayev fell in with Sudeikin's curious idea that an alliance between the secret service and the People's Will would accomplish what the Party had failed to bring about: a liberal regime. Degayev's sister, who was in his confidence, substantially corroborated this version. 'Sudeikin told the prisoner,' she wrote, 'that only with his [Sudeikin's] help could the People's Will seize power. He spoke less like a police officer than like a fellow populist, admitting that the existing order was in need of a thorough overhauling, but arguing that the Party's tactics were wrong and hence it was getting nowhere.' Degayev realized that his pact with Sudeikin involved the loss of certain comrades, but he told himself that no revolutionary enterprise had ever succeeded without sacrifices.

To achieve their end, Sudeikin and his prisoner agreed that the latter must rejoin his comrades. Accordingly a fake escape was conveniently arranged for him while he was being transferred from one prison to another. This occurred on 14 January, 1883, and a week or two later he turned up in the capital as a representative of the Executive Committee. He was not the first activist to turn State's evidence. Treason dogged the People's Will, as it had its predecessors. But for the first time the police had an informant who belonged to the inner core of the Party.

Sudeikin had apparently assured Degayev that his primary interest was not in making arrests, but in directing the activities of the People's Will in accordance with the plans the two had laid. But before long he changed his tune. Arguing that it was necessary, first of all, to protect the Government from the terrorists, he seized Vera Figner and her associates. [Vera Figner was condemned to death, but her sentence was commuted to a life term of hard labour. Actually she spent twenty years in prison and died in 1942 at the age of ninety.] He then attacked the Party's military organization. So numerous were the arrests among its leading members that it was utterly cruched.

Except for some groups on its loose periphery, the People's Will was now completely at the mercy of the police. Indeed, it functioned under the aegis, as it were, of the head of the secret service in the capital, Lieutenant-Colonel Sudeikin. The forged passports used by 'illegals' were supplied by his office. It has even been said that he had edited the two issues of the Party's Bulletin printed in 1883.

The relations between him and his 'ally' were unusual, to say the least. Though he had every reason to be suspicious, he trusted Degayev fully and confided to him his secret ambitions. He belonged to the race of men with a giant appetite for power and no scruples about getting it. He dreamed of making himself indispensable to the Czar and the highest dignitaries of the realm by convincing them that he alone stood between them and death at the hands of the revolutionaries. To that end he planned to organize, with Degayev's help, a terrorist group, and then under some pretext, such as disability caused by a fake attack on his life, resign from the service. Then one or two key notables, such as the Minister of the Interior, would be assassinated. Panic-stricken, the Emperor would recall him, and under the circumstances it would be easy for him to get the Minister's post. He would become the most powerful man in the land, the all-Russian dictator, before whom even the Czar would quake. Through Degayev he would also rule the underground. The two of them would constitute the real Government of the Empire.

At first Degayev may have been impressed with this grandiose scheme, in which a place was duly reserved for him. But as the weeks slipped by and the arrests caused by his disclosures multiplied, while Sudeikin did nothing to keep his side of the pact, the future duumvir perceived that his own role remained that of a mere informer. Moreover, his position was becoming more difficult. To shield him, the police spread the rumour that a young woman who had been arrested with him and subsequently set free was turning State's evidence. Nevertheless he was not altogether above suspicion. A Colonel of the gendarmerie gave away the secret of Degayev's escape to an army man, who, while in his cups, repeated what he had been told within the hearing of someone who passed the word on to the local group of the People's Will. There were those who dismissed the story, but others were ready to believe it.

Degayev was beginning to labour under a severe mental strain. Perhaps to get respite from contacts with his comrades perhaps to find out how he stood with the leadership, he persuaded Sudeikin to send him abroad. His trip appears to have taken place in May. He went to Geneva with the object of luring Tikhomirov from there to Germany, where the expatriate was to be kidnapped and taken to Russia. The two men had several unhappy talks. On one occasion Tikhomirov observed that the condition of the Party was hopeless and that some sort of compromise with the Government was perhaps the best way out. Degayev, deciding that he was talking to a man who might be won over to his side, spoke freely and before he knew it, he found himself revealing his compact with Sudeikin. Tikhomirov listened impassively. Degayev talked on, looking for some sign of indignation at his treachery, some token of admiration for his noble intentions. But the host in no way betrayed his emotions. Finally Degayev exclaimed that his fate was in Tikhomirov's hands. It was for the Executive Committee -- he was still in awe of that body, which was now little more than a name -- 'either to mete out to him the punishment he deserves,' as the above-mentioned statement in Narodnaya volya has it, 'or to allow him to make amends for his crime, at least to some extent, by doing the Party a signal service.'

Tikhomirov was in a quandary. His visitor had said that he had given Sudeikin information about certain individuals, which had not as yet been acted upon. To denounce the informer and have him assassinated would mean to expose these people to arrest. He agreed not to disclose Degayev's secret if the latter would save those who had not been seized by arranging for their escape abroad. Furthermore, Degayev was to execute Sudeikin with his own hands.

The only person Tikhomirov took into his confidence was Maria Oshanina, the sole other member of the Executive Committee. Perhaps he was not sure that there would be approval of the conditions he had imposed on Degayev, dictated as they were by expediency rather than by moral scrupulousness.

He made no attempt to warn the remnant of the membership: he kept his side of the bargain. Degayev, on the other hand, was slow in keeping his. Accordingly, in August he was summoned abroad, presumably to be reminded of his promise. Nothing more fully attests the confidence which Sudeikin had in him than the fact that he was allowed to leave the country for the second time.

On his return to Russia he continued to play bis double role undisturbed. He dominated the conference of activists which took place in October and he was elected to a directorate that included three more members, all, of course, known to Sudeikin and completely at his mercy (one of them eventually also turned informer). Unaware of the obligation Degayev had taken upon himself, the conference decreed Sudeikin's liquidation.

About this time one more person learned Degayev's secret. This was Hermann Lopatin, a free-lance revolutionary of whom more will be heard presently. Questioned about the details of his escape from his guards, as the two sat over glasses of tea in Palkin's Restaurant, Degayev became confused and blurted out the truth, including the fact that he had obligated himself to kill Sudeikin. Thereafter Lopatin kept close watch over the informer.

Sudeikin had toyed with the idea of having a fake attempt made on his life. At first Degayev had planned to take advantage of this and turn the feigned attack into a genuine one, but had given up the scheme as too chancy. Finally, on 16 December, 1883, he received Sudeikin in his flat on a suitable pretext and there with the aid of two accomplices (one of them eventually became a police agent) who knew nothing of their comrade's real role, killed him and severely wounded the henchman who accompanied him. Degayev was the first to fire, and the other two finished the job with sawed-off crowbars. One of the men had been groomed by Sudeikin, in furtherance of his ambitious plan, for the role of assassin of the Minister of the Interior.

It had been expected that, in destroying Sudeikin, Degayev would meet his own end. But luck was with him. He succeeded in escaping abroad. In Paris his case was examined by a tribunal consisting of Tikhomirov and two other comrades. He was forbidden on pain of death ever to rejoin the ranks of Russian revolutionaries or to return to Russia. As the Government was offering a large reward for his capture, there was no great inducement for him to go back.

Without delay he and his wife embarked for America, landing in Canada and later making their way to the United States. For a while they stayed in St. Louis, where he resumed his studies, and in 1897 received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. For ten years he taught at the University of South Dakota. Professor Alexander Pell, as he now called himself, Dean of College of Engineering, was a popular man on the campus, not only because of his interest in college athletics. 'He was one of the most humane men I have ever known,' one of his students said of him. The issue of the college magazine for 25 March, 1901, contained this notice: 'Dr. and Mrs. Pell entertained the class of which he is class father. From the head of the table beamed the jolly countenance of Jolly Little Pell [he was rather short] cracking jokes faster than the freshmen could crack nuts.' A childless couple, the Pells surrounded themselves with young people whom they housed and helped through college. From South Dakota the professor was called to the Armour Institute of Technology.

On the death of his wife, he married one of his students, an American girl, and when his failing health obliged him to retire from the Armour Institute he went to live first at South Hadley and later at Bryn Mawr, where his wife was teaching. He is said to have hailed Russia's defeat by Japan and to have viewed the Bolshevik Revolution with aversion. His Russian past was apparently a sealed book to his American associates. To protect himself against embarrassing disclosures, he had his brother Vladimir send a dispatch to a Russian newspaper in 1909 or 1910, to the effect that Sergey Degayev died in New Zealand. His actual death occurred in 1921. An obituary of him by a former colleague concluded thus: 'His generosity and loyalty will live long in the hearts of those who were privileged to know him.'

III

A statement by the Executive Committee denouncing Degayev was drafted shortly after Sudeikin's assassination, but was not published till nearly a year after. Almost immediately, however, the news of Degayev's treachery leaked out. A storm of indignation swept the thin ranks of the People's Will. Why, they asked, had he not been brought to book after his confession? Why had they not been warned? In the absence of an authoritative account of the affair, there were those who concluded that Degayev had done his infamous work with the approval of the Executive Committee.

For some time dissatisfaction with the organization and programme of the Party had been on the increase, particularly among the proselytes. The Degayev incident, in damaging the prestige of the Executive Committee, strengthened the opposition. Early in 1884 the revisionist ferment resulted in the formation of a dissident faction, which adopted the name of the Younger People's Will. It looked upon itself not as a unior adjunct to the Party, but as its heir and successor.

The Young focused their attention on the urban proletariat. They favoured terrorism, but they wanted it directed against economic exploiters near at hand, rather than against political oppressors far away. Their immediate objective was to force the Czar to convoke a Constituent Assembly and they were opposed to the idea of dictatorship by the Party. Above all, they advocated rebuilding the People's Will along more democratic lines. They argued that the Executive Committee, self-perpetuating, authoritarian, was a brake on the growth of the movement and should be replaced by a directorate, representative of and responsible to the membership. While the Old Guard stood for a strong central authority, an organization directed from above, the Young clamoured for local autonomy, an organization growing from below. This was the very rock on which, in a later generation, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was to split into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

The Old Guard was not ready to give up the fort without a struggle. Tikhomirov made a half-hearted attempt to reassert the authority of the shadowy Executive Committee. Before he had expatriated himself, he had intended to bid farewell to revolution. Degayev's confession had made him change his mind. Since the Party at home was completely under the thumb of the police, he had decided that it was incumbent on him to try and create abroad a nucleus of the tried and true, around which a resurrected Narodnaya volya might eventually grow. Accordingly, he joined Lavrov in Paris, and together they launched a new journal. At first it was planned as a forum for the various shades of revolutionary thought. But when the new review made its bow, in September, 1883, it bore the title, Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (Messenger of the People's Will), and the sub-title: Organ abroad of Russian Socialism as it expresses itself in the People's Will. Of the two editors, Lavrov was not a member, but, as it were, an ally of the Party, while Tikhomirov was already in the grip of that crisis which eventually led to his withdrawal from the revolutionary camp. The Vestnik was a heavy-handed, academic affair, and its bulky issues, appearing at long intervals, made little impression on the public to which it addressed itself.

In February, 1884, delegates of the several groups that were still active met in Paris. The opposition was not represented and the authority of Tikhomirov and Maria Oshanina was not challenged. They appointed a three-man Commission, which was instructed to proceed to Russia and try to revive the Party without changing a jot or tittle in its programme or organization.

The trio included Hermann Lopatin, who has already been mentioned. A man of about forty, he had been on the fringe of the movement since his student days, but, unable to submit to party discipline, he avoided formal affiliation with any group. During his stay in London he became friendly with Marx and Engels. A knight errant of the revolution, he had been repeatedly arrested, and on several occasions managed to break jail. He had helped Lavrov escape abroad and had unsuccessfully attempted to free Chernyshevsky from his Siberian bondage. The People's Will acquired in him an adherent of unusual resourcefulness and irrepressible spirit, with a dash of amateurishness and frivolity in his make-up.

He reached Petersburg in March and was soon joined by his two associates. They found the opposition in a truculent mood and firmly entrenched both in the capital and in the provinces. The Young People's Will denied the authority of the expatriates and treated their emissaries as imposters. Lopatin took a conciliatory attitude toward the dissidents. He humoured them, he argued with them, he tried to show them that a breach was both harmful and unnecessary. The pourparlers were conducted in an atmosphere of mutual irritation and downright hostility. Things were at such a pass that the arrest of a member of one faction was met by the other with a sigh of relief.

Nevertheless, by June an uneasy peace had been patched up. The schismatics gave up the idea of bringing out a journal of their own, destroyed most of the copies of their programme that had been run off on their own press, and returned to the fold, not without some mental reservations. The Petersburg Workers' Group, a mainstay of the opposition, chose to remain outside the Party. What seems to have put an end to the conflict was a succession of arrests. They were particularly numerous among the Young; the two agents planted by the police in that group earned their keep.

The feud over, the activists were now able to concentrate on rehabilitating the Party. The task was difficult. It was necessary to get rid of informers, to ascertain who had been betrayed to the police by Degayev, to deal with the deviations that had arisen during the absence of central control, to raise funds. In order to replenish the cashbox, attempts were made to rob the mails and during one of them a postman was killed. These exploits were not approved by the Commission of Three. Lopatin argued that the post was a public institution, the neutrality of which the Party should scrupulously respect.

He lacked neither energy nor initiative. He spent the summer touring provincial centres in an effort to renew contact with the old groups and establish new ones. His labours were not very fruitful. There was no want of proselytes, but much energy was wasted in petty quarrels. Nevertheless two printing presses were set up, and copy was assembled for an issue of Narodnaya volya, which had been in a state of suspended animation since February, 1882. The long-awaited number of the journal, dated September, 1884, appeared in the autumn. It contained the belated and rather lame statement on Degayev, which has already been mentioned -- in fact, two somewhat contradictory statements. It also presented a declaration by the Young People's Will, describing its position and explaining that it had merged with the Party because the two factions were separated by a divergence of theoretical views, which 'for the time being' was not likely to lead to such a disagreement on practical matters as would result in a split. In an effort to placate the Young and reaffirm his populist faith, Lopatin wrote that whether the masses were summoned to have their say 'from the height of the throne shaken by the blows of revolutionaries,' or by the Party, after it had seized political power 'for a moment,' the ultimate result would be the same: 'We firmly believe that on our soil the coming transformation cannot degenerate into a purely political constitution, but will surely bring with it all the agrarian and other economic and social reforms which are compatible with the present intellectual development of mankind.' He was thus restating the thesis Tikhomirov had advanced in the article mentioned earlier in the chapter, namely, that in Russia the overthrow of the monarchy was bound to usher in the socialist organization of the country's economy.

The feeling was that the Party should give more telling evidence of its existence than an issue of its journal and the execution of a spy, which occurred early in 1884. Lopatin was a believer in terrorism. What wouldn't he give, he said, for a couple of 'butchers' like the pair that had helped Degayev dispatch Sudeikin. He would have liked to direct a blow at the occupant of the throne, but compromised on a lesser target: Count Dmitry Tolstoy, the arch-reactionary Minister of the Interior. [The previous year the Count had told Prince Bernhard von Bülow that should the autocracy, which admittedly had its shortcomings, be overthrown, the result was sure to be not a parliamentary regime but 'naked Communism,' the doctrine that Karl Marx had preached.] Chance had saved the man from the poisoned dagger of one member of the Young People's Will and from the pistol of another. Now it was decided to use bombs on him. Several missiles, of a rather faulty construction, made at Lugansk, [Now Voroshilovgrad.] in the South, with dynamite stolen from a Government plant, were brought to the capital by Lopatin himself. In the midst of these preparations, on 6 October, he was arrested.

Lopatin had many qualities useful to a conspirator. Elementary caution was not one of them. When he was seized, he was carrying two bombs. Besides, he had in his pockets a dozen scraps of paper scribbled with passwords and keys to the codes used by the organization, as well as the names and addresses forming a miniature Who's Who of the movement. He had been certain that in an emergency he would manage to swallow these papers, but he was prevented from doing so by the detectives who apprehended him. As a result, there were arrests in thirty-two cities. They were all the more numerous since, as usual, more than one prisoner lost heart and turned informer. Not only activists, but also fellow travellers were hit. The fruits of the organizational work of the previous months were destroyed. Aside from a group of expatriates, all that remained of the People's Will was a handful of individual adherents here and there and, in the larger centres, some scattered cells isolated from each other.

IV

And still the ghost of the People's Will refused to be laid. One more attempt was made to resuscitate the Party. The moving spirit behind this effort was a youth with a fiery temperament who was a born organiser. In 1882, at the age of eighteen, Boris Orzhikh entered the university in his native Odessa and immediately plunged into extra-curricular activities. They assumed such a character that in the summer of 1884 he became an 'illegal.' Then came Lopatin's arrest and debacle.

As Orzhikh watched the collapse of the Party, he had moments of despair, but he did not succumb to it. The destruction was not as complete as had appeared at first. In the southern provinces the secret service was incredibly amateurish, and in such centres as Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, entire cells remained intact. Here and there a bundle of underground literature had been saved, or the implements for forging passports. Moreover, among the ruins new life was stirring: there were converts, awkward, inexperienced, yet full of ardour for the cause. With the help of a few fellow students and factory hands, he set to work.

His immediate aim was to revive the local groups in the South. He visited several cities and was somewhat encouraged by what he found. His ambitions soared when he discovered a dozen bombs available for use. They had been made with dynamite stolen from the same plant that had supplied the explosive for the missiles found on Lopatin. Having learned that Count Tolstoy, Minister of the Interior, was going to the Crimea for a rest, Orzhikh decided to attack him at a southern railway station. This was in the spring of 1885. With several bombs in his luggage he went to Kharkov, more than once during his trip barely escaping catastrophe. But when he reached Kharkov he heard that the Count was being taken South in a state of acute mental derangement. Orzhikh decided to let well enough alone.

Frustrated but undismayed, he busied himself with other matters, such as the resumption of secret printing. A small press was set up in Kharkov, but the police, tipped off by an informer, promptly seized it. The printer resisted arrest, killing an officer, and was hanged. Two other presses were set up in out-of-the-way towns and Orzhikh began to get together copy for a new issue of the organ of the non-existent Party. He had the help of two young students, Lev Sternberg and Natan Bogoraz. Both, eventually exiled to farthest Siberia, were to become noted ethnographers. Like the Young People's Will before them, Orzhikh and his comrades did not feel that they were accountable to the expatriates and did not apprize Tikhomirov of the plan. The text of the projected number of Narodnaya volya was approved at a meeting of half a dozen representatives of the more active cells. The 'conference,' as the gathering was grandiloquently styled, elected a committee which was to co-ordinate the activities of local groups throughout the South. A definite step was thus taken toward restoring the Party.

The printing of the issue was not completed until December. The leading article repeated the old slogan: delenda est Carthago: the autocracy must be crushed and replaced by a democratic regime. The prevalent black reaction was dismissed as the last desperate effort of a doomed despotism. True, the downfall of the monarchy would not mean a political and social revolution in one -- 'life had smashed that hope.' But neither would it be a mere scene-shifting, the dawn of a bourgeois era, a new way of exploiting the people 'under cover of an illusory freedom.' Great changes would follow, above all the long-awaited redistribution of land. And let 'our Olympians dwelling in the beautiful faraways -- a thrust at expatriates who had embraced Marxism -- be reassured: the fears of these doctrinaires that the agrarian reform would delay the advent of Socialism were without foundation. In the West every summons to social revolution had fallen on deaf ears, because the farmers there had been bred to the belief in private property. Not so in Russia, where the peasants 'to a man' held that the land belongs to him who works it.

The issue of the journal -- it was to be the last -- made a great stir. It was incontrovertible proof that the Party had not been wiped out. The group was now able to enlarge the scope of its activities. His luggage weighed down with copies of Narodnaya volya, Orzhikh visited the central and northern provinces, travelling as far as Dorpat (now Tartu). His ambition was to revive the local circles there and set up regional boards, like the one that existed in the South. To a limited extent he was successful. He was instrumental in establishing the nucleus of an organization in Moscow, though not in Petersburg, where only one group, a workmen's circle, was functioning.

The year 1886 opened calamitously. A Southern activist, arrested, turned State's evidence. One of the secret presses was discovered, and the other had to be abandoned. Arrests multiplied. In February Orzhikh himself was seized. Another informer turned up in Moscow, with disastrous results for the group there. Shortly before his arrest, which occurred in December, Bogoraz succeeded in printing the last issue of the Party Bulletin.

Late that year the Geneva organ of the People's Will also folded up. Tikhomirov, its co-editor, had long since lost his faith in revolution, but continued to advocate it by inertia, as it were, and without betraying his change of heart. Consequently, when two years later he publicly performed a complete volte-face by writing a pamphlet, Why I Have Ceased to Be a Revolutionary, his defection came like a bolt from the blue. In September, 1888, he addressed an abject petition to the Emperor, protesting his sincere repentance and begging permission to repatriate himself, so that he could atone for his past by conduct befitting a faithful communicant and loyal subject. His wish granted, he returned to Russia. Eventually the pillar of the legendary Executive Committee, the spokesman of the band of terrorists who had assassinated Alexander II, became an influential reactionary journalist. The last Czar presented him with a golden inkpot in recognition of his service to the Throne.

V

While the police were mopping up the last vestiges of the organization set up by Orzhikh and his comrades, a new group of militants was forming in the northern capital. They called themselves the Terrorist Section of the People's Will, though they were fully aware that the Party was no more. Nor did they seek to establish contact with any of the remnants of the society to which they nominally belonged, such as the local workmen's circle that had once been part of the Young People's Will. They proposed to act entirely on their own.

At the University of Petersburg there was a secret committee of representatives of a dozen fraternities (zemlyachestva), each made up of men hailing from the same province. In defiance of a police order this committee held a demonstration on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs. Late in the year an attempt was made to mark similarly another anniversary: that of Dobrolubov's death. But when the marchers, wishing to lay a wreath on the grave, reached the cemetery, they found that the police had locked the gate. The procession was surrounded by Cossacks and the names of some of the students were taken down. Feeling ran high on the campus. A leaflet was brought out, which ended by declaring that 'we' would oppose force rooted in spiritual solidarity to brute force used by the Government.

Pygtr Shevyryov, who was chiefly responsible for the leaflet, seems to have initiated the Terrorist Section. The core of it was a handful of students, mere tyros, ignorant of conspiratorial methods, unused to the atmosphere of the underground. Shevyryov himself was a consumptive youth, fanatical and rather unscrupulous, who was not above mystifying and deceiving his comrades in a manner reminiscent of Nechayev. He entertained an ambitious plan to set up a vast revolutionary organization embracing both intellectuals and manual workers.

A leading part was played by Alexander Ulyanov, a reserved, serious young man who majored in zoology. Like several of his comrades, he was a dedicated soul who calmly accepted the prospect of self-immolation in the service of the cause. The most articulate member of the group, it was he who drew up its credo. This deviates from narodnik orthodoxy in holding the working class to be the mainstay of the Party and the chief object of its activities, yet affirms the populist dogma that Russia may achieve Socialism without going through the capitalist phase. Fighting for free institutions, hand in hand with the liberals, is proclaimed the immediate task of the Party, and as long as it lacks mass support, political assassination is declared virtually the sole weapon in its arsenal.

Of course, terror meant regicide. This was an obsession with Shevyryov. Another member transferred from the University of Kazan to that of Petersburg for the express purpose of killing the Emperor. All agreed that the deed had the strongest moral justification. By January, 1887, a plot against the life of Alexander III was well under way. He was to be attacked by bombs, as his father had been. To render them lethal, hollowed-out leaden pellets filled with strychnine were crammed into the space between the inner metal container holding dynamite and the outer cardboard case. Expenses were defrayed with money from the pockets of the conspirators. Ulyanov, who had a hand in the manufacturing of the dynamite, pawned the gold medal he had been awarded by the university for a paper on the organs of fresh-water Annelida. Late in February three missiles were ready.

The plan was to toss a bomb under the Emperor's carriage while he was being driven along Nevsky Prospect. As rumour had it that he was about to depart from the capital, haste was essential. Ulyanov learned by heart a proclamation announcing the monarch's assassination by the (non-existent) Party and made arrangements to have it run off on the group's small press, if the attempt succeeded. Three men, who for days had been studying the Czar's movements, were to give the signal for the attack. Three others made up the bombing squad. They paced the avenue with the bombs held in readiness on 26 February, but the Czar did not emerge from the palace that day. Nor were the plotters luckier on 28 February. When on the afternoon of 1 March -- a memorable date -- bombers and signallers appeared on the avenue for the third time, all of them were arrested. It happened that the previous month a member of the bombing squad had broadly hinted at the impending attack in a letter to a friend. The police had intercepted the missive and identified the author. As a result, detectives grew suspicious when, on 28 February, they noticed that he loitered on the avenue all afternoon, apparently carrying a heavy object under his overcoat and keeping in touch with several other young men. When the same strollers had reappeared the following day, the plain-clothes men seized all of them. 'The second March the first,' as the affair is sometimes designated, had come to nothing.

The prisoners at once pleaded guilty of attempted regicide, and two of them became very communicative, so that other arrests followed. Before they occurred it had been hoped that a second terrorist band, headed by a workman, would repeat the attempt. A small quantity of dynamite was available for the purpose. But as arrests multiplied, all such plans were abandoned. By the end of the month the Terrorist Section had ceased to exist.

Behind closed doors twelve men and three women faced a tribunal consisting of a special panel of senators. Most of the defendants concealed nothing from their judges. Shevyryov was one of the few who tried to minimize their guilt. Ulyanov took upon himself the blame for organizing the group. In his final statement he defended terror as the only weapon at the disposal of a small minority which, in defying a powerful police state, had nothing to lean upon but spiritual strength and the consciousness that it was fighting for justice. 'Among the Russian people,' he concluded, echoing Karakozov's words, 'there will always be found a dozen men and women who are so devoted to their ideas and feel so keenly their country's plight that they will not consider it a sacrifice to lay down their lives for the cause.'

The accused were condemned to death, but capital punishment was commuted to penal servitude or imprisonment for all except five men. The death sentence would probably have been commuted for these too, had they agreed to petition the Emperor for mercy. In refusing his mother's entreaty that he do so, Ulyanov told her that a duelist, having fired his shot, could not very well beg bis adversary not to use his weapon.

Three defendants were given only ten years of hard labour in Siberia in consideration of the fact that they were minors, that they sincerely repented their misdeeds and that 'from the first they had helped the authorities to uncover the crime,' as the final verdict put it. (One of the men eventually committed suicide out of remorse, it is said, for having betrayed his comrades.) For the same reasons Bronislaw Pilsudski, who had supplied the poison for the bombs, received fifteen-year term of hard labour, while his brother, Josef, who was only slightly involved in the affair, was exiled to Siberia for five years by administrative order. He lived to be the head of resurrected Poland and, as commander-in-chief of the Polish troops, he saved his country from Soviet conquest in 1920.

On 8 May the five who had been condemned to death were hanged. One of them managed to shout from the scaffold, 'Long'live the People's Will!' Among the executed was Alexander Ulyanov. His family lived in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), where his father, until his death the previous year, had held the post of superintendent of elementary schools in the province. Alexander's younger brother, Vladimir, learned the news of the execution from a newspaper. It is reported that the seventeen-year-old boy whom the world was eventually to know under the assumed name of Lenin, flung the sheet aside and exclaimed: 'I swear I will revenge myself on them!'

Source URL: http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yar16.html

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Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution

Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism, 1956.

Epilogue

Official reaction and public lethargy ruled the 'eighties. The drab decade contented itself, on the one hand, with what a contemporary satirist called 'pigsty ideals' and, on the other, with the brighten-the-corner-where-you-are philosophy. Nevertheless, the fires of rebellion continued to smoulder, if precariously. Here and there small, ephemeral revolutionary circles managed to carry on. Recruited for the most part from the student youth as well as from among army and navy officers and cadets, they were isolated from each other and in a state of flux.

Following in the footsteps of the Terrorist Section of the People's Will, certain groups advocated the tactics of political assassination, now a policy of despair, and did not limit themselves to talk about it. In 1888 at Zürich several emigres were conducting experiments with the preparation of bombs. These were to be smuggled into Russia and used by a nucleus of a projected nation-wide revolutionary organization. It owed its existence chiefly to the initiative and energy of a young woman by the name of Sophia Ginzburg. One February day in 1889, while staying in the capital, she happened to leave her purse in a store. The shopkeeper found in it the draft of a proclamation announcing the execution of the Czar, which he handed over to the police. Before long she was arrested together with several comrades, and since one of them turned informer, the entire group was wiped out. Sophia Ginzburg committing suicide in prison.

The making of bombs in Zürich ended disastrously, an explosion killing one man and wounding another. Thereupon the terrorists transferred their activities to Paris and established contact with another circle of conspirators at home. As one of the expatriate plotters was a secret service agent, arrests, in 1890, put an end to the activities of both groups.

In the ideological confusion that prevailed in those years two main trends were discernible. One was continuous with militant Populism as represented chiefly by the People's Will. Without accepting its entire platform, not a few activists and would-be activists chose the label narodovoltzy, adherents of Narodnaya volya. The Party was now no more than 'the shadow of a great name.' Yet for at least a decade after it had ceased to exist it continued to be a feeble rallying cry in an age of dispersion and discouragement. The other trend meant a break with tradition, espousal of a doctrine rather new to the intelligentzia: Marxism.

The writings of Marx and Engels and the social-democratic movement dominated by their ideas had not been unknown in Russia. Marx's Critique of Political Economy had a larger sale there than anywhere else. As has been said, in 1869 a translation of The Communist Manifesto, made, oddly enough, by its authors' arch-enemy, Bakunin, came from a Geneva press. Three years later a rendering of Das Kapital was openly published in Petersburg, the censor feeling that few would read the tome and fewer would understand it. The book did find a considerable public -- nine hundred copies were sold during the first fifty days -- but failed to impress itself on radical thinking. Marx was chiefly prized as a detractor of capitalism. His emphasis on the economic factor appealed to those whose orientation was apolitical. For the rest his doctrine was held inapplicable to Russia. With the collapse of the People's Will this attitude underwent a change.

In the autumn of 1883 a few expatriates living in Switzerland formed an Association which called itself Liberation of Labour. Its objectives were to spread 'scientific Socialism' among the intelligentzia and to create the nucleus of a Russian labour party modelled on that of Germany. Ironically enough, these converts to Marxism were the former leaders of Black Repartition, that champion of populist orthodoxy. In the words of one of them, Black Repartition died in childbirth, having brought forth Russian social-democracy.

The members of the group could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But it included a man, already mentioned in these pages, who combined a subtle and richly equipped intellect with a literary gift and who, moreover, was possessed of the temperament of a revolutionary and the zeal of a missionary: Georgy Plekhanov. In two pamphlets, which came out in Geneva in 1883 and 1884 respectively, he subjected the populist ideology, the programme of the People's Will and the 'Jacobin' trend within it, to a withering critique. The industrial proletariat, not the peasantry, was the hope of Socialism in Russia, as elsewhere, he argued; the immediate future in Russia belonged to capitalism, a progressive and 'historically inevitable' phase; the coming upheaval was bound to be a purely political change-over -- to act on the assumption that the end of the monarchy would coincide with the socialist revolution was 'to retard the achievement of both goals'; the obshchina was moribund and, in any case, it could not set the country on the way to Communism. [On this point there was disagreement within the group. Vera Zasulich, for one, held that capitalism would be wiped off the face of the earth before the disintegration of the obshchina, and that the latter would then be of inestimable value to Russia.]

The propositions elaborated in Plekhanov's spirited essays, which offered the earliest formulation of Russian Marxism, were presented succinctly in the group's platform. This was printed in 1884, a revision of it appearing in 1888. The earlier text calls for a democratic constitutional regime as the first objective of the labour party. The possibility of a spontaneous revolutionary movement among the peasants is not excluded, and it is stated that the association by no means ignores their interests. On the contrary, the second version of the platform declares that the muzhik neither understands nor sympathizes with the revolutionaries and is indeed the chief support of the monarchy. By way of a sop to populist sentiment, however, the hope is held out that the overthrow of the old regime would arrest the dissolution of the peasant commune.

A few copies of these publications, as well as some social-democratic literature in the original German, found their way into Russia. There was then but little good soil for the seed. The industrial depression that started in 1881 had arrested the growth of the infant labour movement, and the prevalent apathy was not favourable to the spread of the new gospel. Among radicals, both at home and abroad, the term 'social-democrat' was in bad odour. Furthermore, though Populism as a political movement had been reduced to impotence, some of its tenets continued vigorously to be championed. In articles and books that had wide circulation a number of publicists and economists defended with new conviction the old thesis that in a backward country, like Russia, capitalism was a predatory, wholly destructive force, but no more a threat than a promise, since it could not possibly grow and was in fact stillborn. In the teeth of increasing evidence to the contrary, these theorists affirmed their belief that the collectivist and equalitarian tradition of the Russian folk had sufficient vitality to defy and eventually to defeat 'the rule of capital.' The country's future, they maintained, lay with a socialist economy, developing out of the native obshchina and artel.

At this time the populist ideology received encouragement from a most unlikely quarter. The year 1886 saw the posthumous publication of a letter written by Karl Marx nearly a decade earlier as a rejoinder to an article in a Petersburg magazine. Therein he admitted to sharing Chernyshevsky's view that by preserving the obshchina Russia might enjoy the fruits of capitalism without suffering its torments. And he took occasion to protest against interpreting his sketch of the origin of capitalism in Western Europe as a pattern which all nations must inevitably follow in the course of their history. He had expressed himself similarly in a communication to Vera Zasulich, dated 8 March, 1881, but the letter had remained unknown outside the circle of her intimates. The obshchina, he had written, was the mainstay of Russia's 'social renascence,' but to function as such it must be guaranteed 'conditions of free development.' He was more explicit in his and Engels' foreword to the second Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto, printed at Geneva in 1882. [That year there appeared two more Russian editions of the Manifesto, one hectographed secretly in Petersburg, the other lithographed in Moscow.] 'Should the Russian revolution be the signal for the workers' revolution in the West,' they wrote, 'so that the two complement each other,' then the obshchina might prove 'the starting point of communist development.'

It should be noted that at the time Marx held the days of Western capitalism to be numbered. He, as well as Engels, also greatly overestimated the chances of revolution in Russia. In handing down his sanguine opinion on the role of the rural commune, he may have been guided by the desire not to injure the morale of the Russian activists, who, he knew, had pinned their faith to the muzhik's collectivist habits. Be that as it may, Marx appeared to lend his great authority to the basic proposition of Populism, namely, that Russia might bypass capitalism on its way to the socialist order. It was Marx against the Russian Marxists.

In one respect did the theorists mentioned above deviate from militant populism: they implied that its objectives could be achieved within the framework of the existing order. The sole requirement was for the Government to stop fostering large-scale industries and to protect the interests of peasants and artisans. Also it was necessary to raise the cultural level of the masses. The cry: 'delenda est Carthago' was muted, and that not only because the writings of these authors had to stand the censor's scrutiny. Temporarily, Populism assumed the character of a moderate, reformist doctrine. In every way it was opposed to the principles of the Liberation of Labour group.

The circles that adhered to its tenets in the 'eighties were small, few, and short-lived. Their membership, like that of the other groups, came for the most part from the student body. They were chiefly busy indoctrinating the few factory hands they could reach, with a view to preparing leaders of the future labour movement. Some of those who called themselves social-democrats were content to leave the fight against the monarchy to the bourgeoisie, holding that their own task was to make the proletariat ready to use the freedom won by their class adversary. Between the Marxist and non-Marxist coteries relations were still rather amicable. In fact, a merger of the two was held possible. There were circles with programmes that were an amalgam of Populism and Marxism. Not a few heads held a jumble of ideas derived from the Communist Manifesto, on the one hand, and from the writings of Herzen and Lavrov, on the other.